Or to really jazz it up (this is an example on the Mathemat-ica website) : Plot x, x2, x3, x4, x, 1, 1, AxesLabel x, y, PlotLabel Style Framed 'Graph of powers of x', Blue, Background Lighter Yellow -1.0 -0.5 0.5 1.0 x-1.0-0.5 0.5 1. The function $g$ will always return (“a height of”) one. y Graph of powers of x Notice that text is put within quotes. No matter what values you choose for $x$ and $y$, If you choose a point $(x,y)$ in the $xy$-plane, then $z=f(x,y)$ represents the height of the graph at that point.įor example, here's the graph of a simple function, $g(x,y)=1$. The $z$-axis represents height, and this is the key to graphing $f(x,y)$. If we draw the $x$-$y$-$z$ coordinate axes in the standard way, The function f takes two inputs, $x$ and $y$, and returns a single number, which we call $z$. You may not find this formal definition particularly enlightening,īut we can show how the graph of $f(x,y)$ is a surface. The graph of $z=f(x,y)$, since we think of the points as lying in Such a scale is nonlinear: the numbers 10 and 20, and 60 and. We define the graph of a scalar-valued function of two variables, This graph's main version resides at Template:Graph:Lines. A logarithmic scale (log scale) is a way of displaying numerical data over a very wide range of values in a compact waytypically the largest numbers in the data are hundreds or even thousands of times larger than the smallest numbers. Normally you would do this with AxesLabel. There's no built-in option for this but it is easy to do once you know how. Because the scale of the line chart's horizontal (category) axis cannot be changed as much as the scale of the vertical (value) axis that is used in the xy (scatter) chart, consider using an xy (scatter) chart instead of a line chart if you have to change the scaling of that axis, or display it as a logarithmic scale. When plotting the points in the $xy$-plane, they typically form a curve a points, such as the graph This is a trick that eluded me for a few days but finally I managed to RTFM it. The graph of $y=f(x)$, since we think of the points as lying in the $xy$-plane. Remember, when you use log, there is an infinite distance in log scale between y 1 and y 0, since it has to pass through y exp(-1), y exp(-2), y exp(-3), and so on, each of which needs to be allocated the same screen distance as between y exp(0) and y exp(1). Then the graph of $f$ is the set of points $(x,f(x))$ for all $x$ in the domain of $f$. If $f$ is a scalar-valued function of a single variable, $f:\R \to \R$ (confused?),