Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Arc Length

Today in class, we learned about Arc Length. Since we know the length of a line segment is equal to the square root of (change in x squared plus change in y squared), we can multiply that formula by 1 in the form of change in t over change in t to get the formula for arc length. This formula turns out to be the integral from t1 to t2 of the square root of (dv/dt)^2 + (dy/dt)^2. We can now use this formula to find the arc length of an integral for parametric equations.

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