Conclusion

Following completion of this free OpenLearn course, Introduction to differentiation, as well as being able to ‘differentiate’, you should find that you are increasingly able to communicate mathematical ideas and apply your knowledge and understanding to mathematics in everyday life.

You should now be able to:

• understand the idea of differentiation from first principles
• differentiate power functions
• find stationary points of some functions
• determine the nature of some stationary points using either the first or second derivative tests
• understand and work with derivatives as rates of change in mathematical models.

This free OpenLearn course is an extract from the Open University module MST124 Essential mathematics 1. To see if you are ready to study MST124, see the landing page for Mathematics and Statistics at the Open University. If you feel you might benefit from some extra help with algebra you may like to study another free OpenLearn course, Introduction to algebra, an adapted extract from the Open University module MU123 Discovering mathematics. If you feel you are ready to move on but don’t have time to study a full Open University module at this time, you might be interested in Introduction to number theory, an adapted extract from the Open University module MST125 Essential mathematics 2. If you are interested in statistics, you may like to study Prices, location & spread, an adapted extract from the Open University module M140 Introducing statistics.