Welcome to calculus. 
I'm professor Grist. We're about to begin lecture one on 
functions. Welcome to chapter one. 
Every story begins with a cast of characters. 
In this story of calculus, our characters are functions. 
And the plot revolves around how these functions interact with each other, and 
what characterizes them. From the local workings of their inner 
behaviors, to the global sweep of their asymptotics, this lesson and this course, 
begin with functions. Calculus is all about functions. 
And indeed, that is where this course begins. 
Now you're probably used to thinking about functions in terms of their graphs. 
The pair, x with f of x, for a function f. 
One can also take a more mechanistic view, where x is considered as an input 
to f, and f of x is considered as the output. 
Indeed, visualizing this as a machine is extremely helpful, where one feeds x into 
f. And receives, as an output, f of x. 
With this in mind, certain terminology about functions becomes natural. 
For example, the domain of a function f, consists of all possible inputs. 
All the things you might put into the function. 
The range of a function, f, consists of all possible outputs, things you might 
receive from f. Now this is single variable calculus, and 
because of that, our domain's in our ranges, are going to be relatively 
simple. There going to consist of either the real 
number line, or a certain sub intervals, there of. 
Certain operatios on functions become critical. 
Perhap's the most important is that of composition. 
F composed with g, this is the function that takes, as it input, x and returns 
its output. Denoted f composed with g of x, and that 
is g of x fed into the function f. We say f of g of x. 
One can visualize this, as chaining together the functions f and g. 
And in the proper order, g comes first, and then f. 
For example, if one considers the function, square root of 1 minus x 
squared. How can one decompose this into the 
composition of f and g? Well, f, in this case, would be the 
function that is on the outside, or that is done last. 
This is the square root function. G, that which comes first, is, what is on 
the inside of the square root function, mainly g of x equals, 1 minus x squared. 
One additional important operation on functions, is that of inverse. 
The inverse of a function f is denoted with an f with superscript negative 1. 
Don't let that fool you, that does not mean you take the reciprocal of f of x, 
indeed f inverse of x is defined. As that function which takes as its input 
x, and returns as an output f inverse of x. 
Such that if one composes with f, one gets back the original value of x, for 
all such x. Now, one can also run this in reverse. 
If you do f first, and then f inverse, one again obtains x. 
that means that intuitively, f inverse is the machine that undoes whatever f does. 
Let's look at a specific example. Where we take as f the function x cubed. 
What would be the inverse of this be? Well, it has to be a function that undoes 
whatever x cubed does. This is, as you may have guessed, x to 
the 1 3rd power, or the cube root of x. Now there are several ways to see why 
this is right. One is that, in taking the inverse we are 
reversing the role, the input and the output. 
Or geometrically, we are flipping the graph of this function along the diagonal 
line, where the input and the output are equal. 
Of course, we can also think in terms of what the inverse has to satisfy, if we do 
x cubed and then take it's cubed root, we get x. 
Or the other way around, if we take the cube root of x and cube it, we get x. 
Certain classes of functions wind up being extremely important throughout 
calculus. Perhaps the simplest such class, is that 
of the polynomials. That is, functions of the form a 
constant, plus a constant times x, plus a constant times x squared, all the way up 
to some finite degree, constant times x to the n. 
That largest power of x is called the degree. 
There is a summation notation, that makes writing out polynomials very simple. 
We use the Greek capital Sigma, and right polynomial as the sum Sigma, as k goes 
from 0 to n of c sub k times x to the k. Here the c k's are coefficients, or 
constants. Another class of commonly observed 
functions are the irrational functions. These are functions of the form P of x 
over Q of x, where P and Q are polynomials. 
Simple examples, like 3x minus 1 over x squared plus x minus 6, are very common 
throughout mathematics and its applications. 
Rational functions are very nice to work with. 
You do, however, have to be careful of what happens in the denominator? 
When you try to plus in a value of x, it evaluates the denominator to 0. 
Your function is not necessary well defined, at such a point. 
Other powers besides integer powers are important and prevalent. 
I'm guessing that you all know what x to the 0 is, that is, of course, equal to 1. 
What is x to the minus one half? And recall that fractional powers can 
note roots, and negative powers mean that you take the reciprocal. 
So that x to the negative one half is 1 over the square root of x. 
And what is x to the 22 7th's? Well, break this up into pieces. 
First, we take x to the 22nd power, and then we take the 7th root of x. 
Lastly, what is x to the pi? Well we're not going to answer that quite 
yet, but you may have a guess, especially considering the fact that there are 
rational numbers that are very close to the irrational number pi. 
Trigonometric functions are extremely common, and important. 
You should already know a bit about sine, and cosine. 
Let's review. Perhaps the most important of the 
trigonometric identities, that is cosine squared plus sine squared equals 1. 
There's several ways to interpret this. You've seen the interpretation involving 
a right triangle, with hypotenuse equal to 1 and with angle set to theta. 
Then, in this case, the sine of theta is the length of the opposite edge to theta, 
and the cosine of theta, is the length of the adjacent edge. 
If we think of those as x and y coordinates respectively, then we see 
that there's a relationship between this trigonometric identity, and the equation 
for the circle, x squared plus y squared equals 1. 
And indeed, if we think of what happens when we move a point along a unit circle, 
rotating it by an angle theta, from the positive x axis. 
Then the x and y coordinates, of that point on the unit circle, are precisely, 
cosine and the sine, respectively. Other trigonometric functions are common 
and important. I'm sure you recall that tangent is the 
ratio of the sine to the cosine function, and it's reciprocal, the cotangent 
function. One can also take reciprocals of cosine, 
obtaining the secant function, and of sine, obtaining the co-secant function, 
respectively. Now all of these that involve ratios, 
wind up having vertical asymptotes in their graphs, that is, places where the 
function is undefined, and the denominator goes to 0. 
The inverse of the trigonometric functions are very useful, but somewhat 
treacherous. You've got to be careful, some students 
like to write the inverse of sine as sine with a negative 1 superscript. 
That can lead to some confusion thinking that it is the co-secant, or the 
reciprocal of sine. That is unfortunate notation, and I 
encourage you to use instead arcsin to denote the inverse of the sine function. 
The arcsin is that function which, when composed with sine gives you the identity 
back. One of the things that you'll note about 
both the arcsin, and the arccos, is that they have a restricted domain. 
The domain must be the close general from negative 1 to 1. 
Because of course, sine and co-sine can only take values in that interval. 
In contrast to this, the arc tangent function, does have an infinite domain. 
Its range however, is limited between negative pi over 2, and pi over two. 
These are all functions that you're going to want to be familiar with, for moving 
forward in calculus. The last class of functions that is of 
critical importance, are the exponential functions. 
These are functions of the form e to the x. 
to the x being the canonical example of an exponential function. 
It's inverse is the logarithm or more precisely, the natural logarithm, ln of 
x. You've seen these functions before, you 
know, because they're inverses, that their graphs have this symmetry about the 
diagonal. So for example if e to the 0 is 1, as it 
must be, then log of 1 must be equal to 0, certainly. 
The question that is often unanswered in pre-calculus or even elementary calculus 
courses is, what is e? And why is it so important in this 
exponential function? Well one could say that e is that value 
whose logarithm is equal to 1. But since we've defined the natural 
logarithm in terms of base e, that's a bit of circular reasoning. 
How do we reason about e? Well certainly e is a number. 
It is a particular location, on the real number line. 
It has a decimal expansion, but being irrational it is a little bit hard to 
remember all of it. That doesn't really answer the question 
of what is e? Why is it so important? 
Before we get to the answer to that, let's review some of the algebraic 
properties associated with the exponential function. 
I hope you remember that e to the x times e to the y is e to the x plus y. 
The exponents add and e to the x raised to the y power is e to the x times y. 
In your prior exposure to calculus, I'm sure that you've seen some of the 
differential and integral properties of this function. 
E to the x has this wonderful property that it is it's own derivative, and of 
course, but it is its own integral, at least up to a constant. 
These facts are easy to remember, but maybe not so easy to fully comprehend. 
There is one last ingredient that we're going to need before we go deep into 
exploring what e to the x means. This is something called Euler's formula. 
This is simple looking. It states that e to the i times x, equals 
cosine of x plus i times sine of x. This is a wonderful formula, but whatever 
it means. What does it mean? 
What is this i that is in here? I am sure that you've seen before, the 
notation for the square root of negative 1, for the primal imaginary number, i. 
That is what is meant in Euler's formula, it has the property of course that, i 
squared is equal to negative 1. >> Well, this is a formula. 
It's a true statement, but what does it mean? 
Well, that is the subject for our next lesson. 
 >> And so, we end with a mystery about the exponential function, and what it 
means to exponentiate something, that is not a real number. 
In our next lesson, we'll resolve this mystery, in part, by contemplating what 
the exponential function is.