Optimization - Day III (Quick Note)

As a refresher lesson of optimization after Regents Week, we reverted back to optimization of one variable and solved some sample problems. In one of the problems, we had to deal with the distance formula:


After plugging in x and y, we eventually got a quadratic under a radical, and our task was to minimize that distance. What we gleaned from this problem is that when faced with such an optimization problem, it is not necessary to take the derivative of the function INCLUDING the radical. Rather, to minimize or maximize , simply maximize, or minimize, respectively, .

Happy optimizing!