Creating and Evaluating Composite Functions
Composite functions are combinations of functions. This section will teach you how to manipulate composite functions algebraically, define their domain and range, and graph them.
Composition of Functions
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will:
- Combine functions using algebraic operations.
- Create a new function by composition of functions.
- Evaluate composite functions.
- Find the domain of a composite function.
- Decompose a composite function into its component functions.
Suppose we want to calculate how much it costs to heat a house on a particular day of the year. The cost to heat a house will depend on the average daily temperature, and in turn, the average daily temperature depends on the particular day of the year. Notice how we have just defined two relationships: The cost depends on the temperature, and the temperature depends on the day.
Using descriptive variables, we can notate these two functions. The function gives the cost of heating a house for a given average daily temperature in degrees Celsius. The function gives the average daily temperature on day of the year. For any given day, Cost means that the cost depends on the temperature, which in turns depends on the day of the year. Thus, we can evaluate the cost function at the temperature . For example, we could evaluate to determine the average daily temperature on the 5th day of the year. Then, we could evaluate the cost function at that temperature. We would write .
By combining these two relationships into one function, we have performed function composition, which is the focus of this section.
Source: Rice University, https://openstax.org/books/college-algebra/pages/3-4-composition-of-functions
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