- [Voiceover] Hello and welcome
to multivariable calculus.
So I think I should probably start off
by addressing the elephant in the living room here.
I am, sadly, not Sal,
but I'm still gonna teach you some math.
My name is Grant.
I'm pretty much a math enthusiast.
I enjoy making animations of things when applicable,
and boy, is that applicable
when it comes to multivariable calculus.
So, the first thing we gotta get straight
is what is this word multivariable
from the new topic that you're about to study?
Well, I could say it's all about multivariable functions,
that doesn't really answer anything
And basically, the kinds of functions
that we're used to dealing with,
in the old world, in the ordinary calculus world,
will have a single input, some kind of number
as their input,
and then the output is just a single number.
Basically because that guy there is the single variable.
So then a multivariable function
is something that handles multiple variables.
So, you know, it's common to write it as x, y,
it doesn't really matter what letters to use,
and it could be, you know, x, y, z,
x one, x two, x three, a whole bunch of things,
we often think just two variables
and this will output something that depends on
both of those.
Commonly it will output just a number,
so you might imagine a number that depends on
x and y in some way, like, x squared plus y,
but it could also output a vector, right?
So you could also imagine something that's
got multivariable input, f of x, y,
and it outputs something that also has
multiple variables, like,
I mean I'm just making stuff up here,
three x and, you know, two y.
And, this isn't set in stone,
but the convention is to usually think
if there's multiple numbers that go into the output,
think of it as a vector,
just kind of write them,
write them more sideways like this,
and think of them as a point in space.
Because, I mean when you look at something like this,
and you've got an x and you've got a y,
you could think about those as two separate numbers.
with the point x on it somewhere,
maybe that's five, maybe that's three,
it doesn't really matter.
And then you've got another number line
and it's y, and you could think of them
as separate entities.
But, it would probably be more accurate
to call it multidimensional calculus,
because, really, instead of thinking of, you know,
x and y as separate entities,
whenever you see two things like that
you're gonna be thinking about the x y plane.
And thinking about just a single point.
And you'd think of this as a function that takes a point
to a number,
or a point to a vector.
And a lot of people, when they start
teaching multivariable calculus,
and there's lots of fun things,
partial derivatives, gradients,
good stuff that you'll learn.
But I think first of all,
I want to spend a couple videos
we visualize the different types
of multivariable functions.
So, as a sneak peak,
I'm just gonna go through a couple of them
really quickly right now,
just so you kind of whet your appetite
and see what I'm getting at,
but the next few videos are going to go through them
in much, much more detail.
So, first of all, graphs.
When you have multivariable functions,
But these only really apply to functions that have
some kind of two-dimensional input,
which you might think about as living
on this x y plane,
and a single number as their output
and the height of the graph
is gonna correspond with that output.
Like I said, you'll be able to learn much more
about that in the dedicated video on it,
but these functions also can be visualized
just in two dimensions, flattening things out.
Where we visualize the entire input space
in associated color, with each point.
So this is the kind of thing where you, you know,
you have some function
that's got a two-dimensional input,
that would be f of x, y,
and what we're looking at is the x y plane,
and this output's just some number,
you know, maybe it's like x squared,
this particular one is an x squared,
but, you know that,
and maybe some complicated thing,
of that output, and the lines here,
called contour lines,
tell you which inputs all share a constant output value.
These are really nice, much more convenient
than three-dimensional graphs,
to just sketch out.
Moving right along,
I'm also gonna talk about surfaces
They look like graphs,
but they actually deal with a much different animal,
that you could think of it as mapping two dimensions,
And we've got kind of a two-dimensional input,
and you're just looking at what the output
not really caring about how it gets there.
Another fun one is a vector field,
where every input point is associated
which is the output of the function there.
So this would be a function
with a two-dimensional input
and a two-dimensional output
'cause each of these are two-dimensional vectors.
And the fun part with these guys
is that you can just kind of,
imagine a fluid flowing,
so here's a bunch of droplets, like water,
and they kind of flow along that.
And that actually turns out to give insight
about the underlying function.
It's one of those beautiful aspects
of multivariable calc.
And we'll get lots of exposure to that.
Again, I'm just sort of zipping through
to whet your appetite.
Don't worry if this doesn't make sense immediately.
And one of my all-time favorite ways to think about
multivariable functions is to just take the input space,
points in two-dimensional space,
and watch them move to their output,
so, this is gonna be a function that also outputs
in two dimensions.
And I'm just gonna watch every single point
move over to where it's supposed to go.
or to think about at first,
but as you gain a little bit of thought
and exposure to them,
they're actually very nice,
and it provides a beautiful connection
with linear algebra.
if you're studying multivariable calculus,
you either are about to study linear algebra,
or you just have, or maybe you're doing it concurrently,
but understanding functions as transformations
is gonna be a great way to connect those two.
So with that,
I'll stop jabbering through these topics really quickly
and in the next few videos
I'll actually go through them in detail
and hopefully you can get a good feel
for what multivariable functions can actually feel like.