An Application of Newton’s Law Of Cooling

Many introductory calculus texts now include a section devoted to applications of the exponential function. The large variety of commonly encountered phenomena whose processes of growth or decay are exponential affords a rich source of interesting and appealing applications. Students who can easily compute the size a century hence of a world population growing continuously at a rate of 2 percent need little further in the way of convincing that calculus can be useful in the real world of today. Problems involving radioactive decay and growth of investments also strike most students as interesting, dealing as they do with questions that, if not familiar, have at least been heard of by most students.