James Stewart-Calculus_ Early Transcendentals-Cengage Learning (2015)

14
Partial Derivatives
In 2008 Speedo introduced
the LZR Racer and, because
it reduced drag in the water,
many swimming records
were broken. In the project
on page 936 you are asked
to use partial derivatives to
explain why a small decrease
in drag can have a big effect
on performance.
Courtesy Speedo and ANSYS, Inc.
So far we have dealt with the calculus of functions of a single variable. But, in the real world,
physical quantities often depend on two or more variables, so in this chapter we turn our attention
to functions of several variables and extend the basic ideas of differential calculus to such
functions.
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