Talk:Differential calculus

Won't be editing for a while, but I intend to add a section on the chain rule, and some applications and uses. Before I do so I need to look at a couple of university-level books in the library that were useful to me when I was learning calculus. Orderinchaos (talk) 11:26, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

i posted this in the page on calculus. the idea of breaking the line up into a bunch of tiny pieces and finding tangents at each point where as they approach a point of interest their slope approaches the slope of the tangent at that point is not what the limit processes in differentiation is doing. the limit process behind differentiation is taking the slopes of secant lines between the point of interest and as the change in x approaches zero, for a function of a single variable, the slope of the secant lines approach the slope of the tangent line at that point.