Some Mathematical Preliminaries for Physical Oceanography. For example, consider the equation where y is the dependent variable and x is the independent variable. That is, we desire to know the slope of the curve.
Calculus deals with determining the slope of functions.
This is written as . Calculus provides rules for finding the derivatives of different functions. Of course functions can be more complicated such as which has a graph, Figure 1. and the rules for finding the slope are different. All of this should be review for you, but now we get into higher dimensional functions. So now we may want to know how fast T changes with respect to changes in x, or y, or z, or t.