And the man pushes with a constantly changing force — the steeper the incline, the harder the push. As a result, the amount of energy expended is also changing, not just every second or thousandth of a second, but constantly, from one moment to the next. That’s what makes it a calculus problem.
It should come as no surprise to you, then, that calculus is called “the mathematics of change.” Calculus takes the regular rules of math and applies them to fluid, evolving problems.
For the curving incline problem, the physics formulas remain …show more content…
The difference is that — in contrast to the straight incline problem, which you can sort of do in a single shot — you’ve got to break up the curving incline problem into small chunks and do each chunk separately. Figure 1-2 shows a small portion of the curving incline blown up to several times its