Credits

This lab was written entirely from scratch in January 2004.  We had an opening in the lab schedule, and students had been having difficulty with the directional derivative, as well as using gradients to find tangent planes.  That last topic is covered in another lab, but with this introduction it will hopefully work a little better.

Update Fall 2004: renumbered to 2C, minor changes made.  Also, they've already done the tangent plane lab (which used to come after this one) so the introduction to gradients no longer helps with that.  Ah well.

This lab is copyright 2004 by Jonathan Rogness (rogness@math.umn.edu) and is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.  You can find more information on this license at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/

Although it's not specifically required by the license, I'd appreciate it if you let me know if you use parts of our labs, just so I can keep track of it.  Please send me any questions or comments!

Created by Mathematica  (October 4, 2004)