Homework 2 for quiz 2 on 1/20/10

Giancoli Ch 15: 1, 7, 14, 17, 21, 25, 31, 35, 75, 77

Note that problems 31 and 35 require the use of partial differentiation. Unfortunately many students have not yet seen this. Therefore the exams will not include problems that require partial differentiation. It is still important to get the basic idea behind this. You should still try to do these problems following the methods in the book, such as example 15-6. For some discussions of partial differentiation see here and wikipedia. The latter has some formal parts that may be difficult to follow but also some examples which are pretty good.

Partial differentiation is used all the time in upper division physics and engineering because it is the simplest extension of differentiation to more than one variable. It is a lot like normal differentiation where you just hold all other variables constant.