Experiments in Periodicity

When we wake up tomorrow, we know that the night has just past and day is creeping upon us. We know this because such event takes place everyday like a broken record. Plays over and over again. Observing such a phenomenon from a mathematical perspective, we say that we are looking at periodic functions.

As we can all remember from Trigonometry, the sine and cosine functions oscillate in a orderly fashion when we look at it graphically. By orderly fashion, I mean to say that we know the trend of the oscillation after observing it for a short period of time. We can also combine them, take the derivative, and integrate such functions to make a whole new function.

For this lab, we observe such periodic functions by calculating the area under the functions. In other words, we evaluate the definite integrals.

3 thoughts on “Experiments in Periodicity

  1. carriesmith

    I appreciate the connection to real life that you gave in explaining Periodicity. That is what always draws my attention in any introduction and answers the question “Why should I care?” I am excited to see the results if this lab is chosen!

  2. Kenny

    Is this lab only doing definite integrals of periodic functions? Or does the lab seek to answer other questions?

  3. Janae Korfanta

    I was really interested in this lab as well. I find the trig. functions really fascinating, just given all the different subtopics that go with them, so exploring this aspect would be really neat. It will be really cool to see what kind of functions you get when you start to combine the trig. functions.

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