After completing this section, students should be able to do the following.

  • Recognize optimization problems.
  • Translate a word problem into the problem of finding the extreme values of a function.
  • Solve basic word problems involving maxima or minima.
  • Set up an optimization problem by identifying the objective function and appropriate constraints.
  • Solve optimization problems by finding the appropriate absolute extremum.
  • Identify the appropriate domain for functions which are models of real-world phenomena.