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Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

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Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#51

Post by theCricketer »

MIT recorded a set of Calculus video courses back in 1970s that they have since made publicly available. It is taught by a lecturer named Herbert Gross. His style of lecturing is clear, he states why things are defined the way they are and derives everything from first principles. There is an unusual mix of rigor and focus on building understanding - where everything comes from. It also taught me that math is about reasoning logically and rigorously and we shouldn't always rely on intuition (at least while doing math). Deriving almost all the basic calculus results that were drilled into me from the basic concept of a limit, deltas and epsilons was really refreshing.

Compared to more recent OCW calculus videos, I found this to be better in terms of respecting the learner's intellect, presenting the whole proof rigorously and teaching the student to think a certain way.

Calculus Revisited: Single Variable Calculus | MIT OpenCourseWare - https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-006-calculus-revisited-...

Complex Variables, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra - https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-008-calculus-revisited-...

Calculus Revisited: Multivariable Calculus | MIT OpenCourseWare - https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-007-calculus-revisited-...

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#56

Post by ashark »

Good lord. I somehow took (and passed!) a year of high school calculus plus a semester in college, and I never had a good sense for the word "Integral" in a math context as anything but arbitrary jargon. And I've spent a not-tiny amount of time with BetterExplained's calculus. 30 seconds with this book and it's obvious. Now I'm making connections with the French (of which I have barely any, but any port in a storm) and it's solid in my mind.

Well. Now I have to read the whole thing I guess.

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#57

Post by mttyng »

theCricketer wrote: post #51

MIT recorded a set of Calculus video courses back in 1970s that they have since made publicly available. It is taught by a lecturer named Herbert Gross. His style of lecturing is clear, he states why things are defined the way they are and derives everything from first principles. There is an unusual mix of rigor and focus on building understanding - where everything comes from. It also taught me that math is about r…

I watched those lectures in the early stages of my degree and, to confirm what you've stated, they helped me gain a more concrete understanding of the fundamentals of calculus. Highly recommended! Thanks for sharing.

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#58

Post by ramblerman »

c517402 wrote: post #50

IIRC this the book Richard Feynman said he checked out of the library and learned calculus from. Also, Feynman made comments similar to those in the Prologue.

no that was Calculus for the practical man

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7398477-calculus-for-the-...

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#59

Post by tmsldd »

noam87 wrote: post #35
userbinator wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say 1.9MB, the Gutenberg page says 1.8MB, and the download itself is only 1.18MB thanks to gzip. The main difference is that the Gutenberg PDF is a transcribed, cleaned-up version. As much as this probably makes me sound like an audiophile, I actually prefer the raw scans over what may essentially be a reprint. They show all the blemishes, unofficial additions, and other marks that make the book look more "real"…

This is why I love used books. My copy of Schopenhauer's collected essays has gone through 4 owners since 1914, all 4 of whom have signed and dated the front cover, all of 4 of whom have marked and underlined at different spots (including, now, myself). My copy of Riverside Chaucer went through two students before me. And they all pick up their own unique scents along the way (my girlfriend jokes that I only buy book…

Just a side note, off topic: I was that king off person who had a shelf in my house with 300 printed books (and some more stored in boxes in the basement).. it was always a pain when I had to move to a new apartment! After the e-books and pdfs came by we got a lot of flexibility .. now it's easy to have 3000 volumes in the hard disk. You can literally carry a library with you.. I ended up giving away most of them, apart if some classics (e.g. The art of computer programming from Knuth, Operating Systems, from Tanenbaum, and some other classics for image processing..) The only thing I miss very much is that I loved the feeling of picking up one at random and expend a couple of hours ... I just can not have the same feeling with e-books.. :(

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#60

Post by boyhowdy »

As someone who dropped out of Cal II, the first few paragraphs of this book gave me more understanding than I ever had in college... Either I was very lazy, or my teachers couldn't express these simple ideas clearly, or both.
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