Introduction

In this Section we analyse curves in the ‘local neighbourhood’ of a stationary point and, from this analysis, deduce necessary conditions satisfied by local maxima and local minima. Locating the maxima and minima of a function is an important task which arises often in applications of mathematics to problems in engineering and science. It is a task which can often be carried out using only a knowledge of the derivatives of the function concerned. The problem breaks into two parts

This Section ends with maximum and minimum problems from engineering contexts.

Prerequisites

Learning Outcomes

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