Using Programming To Simplify Derivation

by Jeffrey Foster

Submitted : Fall 2013

As students progress further and further in high level math, it becomes tedious to perform low-level mathematics that take long periods of time. An example of this can be found when doing problems that cannot be done with the Chain-Rule, but still require you to multiply out large or unfamiliar numbers together. In an effort to mitigate these issues, I wrote a program in the Java programming language that allows the input of a polynomial, then the output of the first and second derivatives of the input. The program uses the ‘shortcut’ method for determining the derivatives of the inputted polynomial in lieu of using the definition of the derivative, as the use of the definition of the derivative is needlessly complicated for the calculations that the program will be required to do.

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