Before we leave this section, we just want to stress one REALLY, REALLY important concept. All of the graphs and functions that we have shown should already be familiar to you from your general maths units. Just because they are formulated here in reference to flux, diffusion and gradients, doesn’t mean they have any special properties or rules. All the rules you have learned about graphing and manipulation of these general equations and how those functions look on a graph apply here. These same equations come up over and over in biology, physics, chemistry and any other science units you take. The more familiar they are the more comfortable you get in recognising them, the easier all this maths stuff will become. So, one more time, we’re going to show you the: 1) general equations (that you should recognise from your high school maths classes!), 2) specific formulation for its application to diffusion, and 3) graph of the associated function.
| Fick’s First Law as a function of GRADIENT |
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| Fick’s First Law as a function of DISTANCE |
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| Fick’s Second Law, or Time to Diffuse |
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