A this applet is designed to build intuition about partial derivatives
of functions of two variables.
- The control panel asks for values of xWindow, yWindow, and
zWindow to establish a viewing window and a definition of the function
f.
- The value of x0 and y0 are controlled by the vcr buttons in the
control window.
- The three graphics windows give the graph of the surface along
with slices in the planes x=x0 and y=y0.
- Checkboxes allow the suppression of the surface, or the curves
and tangent lines on the slices.
- Readout boxes give the values of f(x0,y0) and the slopes of the
tangent lines to the slices.