ABSTRACT
Engineers use many basic mathematical functions to represent the input/output of systems – linear, quadratic, exponential, and sinusoidal and knowledge of these is needed to determine how these are used to generate some of the more unusual input/output signals such as the square wave, saw-tooth wave and fully rectified sine wave. Periodic functions are used throughout engineering and science to describe oscillations, waves and other phenomena that exhibit periodicity. Graphs and diagrams provide a simple and powerful approach to a variety of problems that are typical to computer science in general, and software engineering in particular; graphical transformations have many applications in software engineering problems. Understanding of continuous and discontinuous functions, odd and even functions, and inverse functions are helpful in this – it is all part of the 'language of engineering'. The chapter discusses standard curves and their equations - straight line, quadratic, cubic, trigonometric, circle, ellipse, hyperbola, rectangular.
