Differential Calculus with Applications to Commerce and Social Sciences

Instructor: Ida Karimfazli
Lectures: Tues. and Thurs. 2-3:30pm in LSK 200
Office hours: Tues. 3:30-5 in LSK 300C, Wed. 4-5:30 LSK 300C
All sections of Math 104/184 share a Piazza page for course discussions.
Please refer to the common website for general info about this course.
Make sure you checkout the learning goals every week and take a look at the suggested problems.
Looking for a place to study with your friends and have tutors around to answer your questions? Check out Math Learning Centre!

Looking for extra motivation?
Jim Simons: A rare interview with the mathematician who cracked Wall Street
A bit more about Jim Simons from wiki:
“James Harris “Jim” Simons (born 1938) is an American mathematician, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is a code breaker and studies pattern recognition.
Simons was a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University and was also the former chair of the Mathematics Department at Stony Brook.
In 1982, Simons founded Renaissance Technologies, a private hedge fund investment company based in New York with over $25 billion under management. Simons retired at the end of 2009 as CEO of one of the world’s most successful hedge fund companies. Simons’ net worth is estimated to be $14 billion.”

On demand equation, Nike and sneakerheads: The secret sneaker market — and why it matters
In the class, we always assume that demand equation is a fixed given relation between demand quantity and price. This talk presents a very interesting example on how in reality the relation between price and demand quantity is far from written in stone… Can companies design/strategize towards a certain demand  equation?

Supplementary notes:
Week12:
More on Taylor polynomials, Practice problem on asymptotes
Week11:
On polynomial approximations
Play with Taylor Polynomials!
Week9:
Illustration of limit of rational functions at infinity
Week8:
Introductory slides on sketching functions
Week7:
Slides on local & absolute min & max
Week6:
On growth rates and continuous compounding
Week5:
Exercises on implicit differentiation (solutions), The power rule
Week4:
Short interesting read on average cost, revenue and profit of iPhone 5
Week2:
Examples on continuity and tangent line
Week1:
Illustration of the relationship between average and instantaneous rates of change(33-sec video)
Notes on $latex displaystyle lim_{x to 0} sin(1/x)$
Week0:
Examples on logarithms