Easter Post

First off, Happy Easter to everyone! I hope you are enjoying your time off...I know I am trying to get the most out of it. :-).

Second off, I have no recollection whatsoever of what we did this week in Calculus...I think we did like a practice test or something... I don't know. Therefore, I guess I will just explain something random as I have nothing to work off of for what you guys did not know...

Wait, I just had a glimpse :-).

So, on the practice test we took, we worked a problem that involved acceleration, velocity, position, and distance traveled. So, in an earlier post on this blog I kind of messed something up that I want to clear up..

I had previously said that the integral of the position function is displacement; this is wrong of course.

What I had meant to say, is that the integral of the absolute value of velocity is the distance traveled, and the integral of velocity is simply the displacement. Now, the absolute value is important to note because 1) you will get it wrong if you don't use it (for distance traveled) and 2) you have to use your calculator to integrate it (at least as far as I know). The reason it is the absolute value is because if you Physics students will recall, displacement and distance are two different things. If I move 15 meters right, 13 meters left, then 4 meters right, that would have a displacement of 15-13+4=6 meters to the right; however, the distance traveled will be 15+13+4=32 meters. To handle this in Calculus, we will simply use the absolute value so that when taking the integral, nothing will cancel out. Hopefully that explains the concept a little better than my previous post on the subject.

Enjoy the holidays :-).