this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
612 points (98.3% liked)

Science Memes

11223 readers
2800 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

"All the little bits"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I've always just thought of it as derivatives describe the rate of change and integrals the total of whatever it is that has been done.

Like if we're talking about an x that describes position in terms of t, time, dx/dt is the rate of change of position over change in time, or speed. Then ddx/dt is change in speed over change in time, or acceleration. And dddx/dt is rate of change in acceleration over change in time (iirc this is called jerk). And going the opposite way, integrating jerk gets acceleration, then speed, then back to position. But you lose information about the initial values for each along the way (eg speed doesn't care that you started 10m away from the origin, so integrating speed will only tell you about the change in position due to speed).

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

That's how I thought of it too. I really liked calculus; being able to measure another part of the graph was interesting to me.