The Saskatchewan death rate, long in the 7.5â8.5/1,000 range, increased to 9.2 in 2001, perhaps to some extent due to the âbaby boomâ generation of the 1950s now reaching retirement age, but mostly due to a significant expansion of older-aged population.
Differentiation is an operation that allows us to find a function that outputs the rate of change of one variable with respect to another variable. Informally, we may suppose that we're tracking the position of a car on a two-lane road with no passing lanes.
The Definition of Differentiation. The essence of calculus is the derivative. The derivative is the instantaneous rate of change of a function with respect to one of its variables. This is equivalent to finding the slope of the tangent line to the function at a point. Let's use the view of derivatives as tangents to motivate a geometric definition of the derivative.