Abstract: In life, people will encounter a lot of problems, which need to be solved with mathematical ideas and methods. In order to better reflect the applicability of mathematics, teachers can take students as the leading role in teaching, introduce mathematical models into real life or major, so as to teach students how to solve practical problems. This paper mainly discusses how to use derivative to solve the optimization problem which is closely related to the major and life in higher mathematics teaching, so as to arouse the enthusiasm of students. In the teaching process, through the analysis of these practical cases, we can guide students to explore effective solutions and popularize them to cultivate students' ability to solve problems by applying mathematical knowledge.

Key words: Optimization, Mathematical model, Derivative, Objective function