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Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

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Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#141
I have an embarrassing amount of Calculus books. My dad taught the subject in a high school and community college; I suppose I have a soft spot for it. "Calculus Made Easy" is a good book though I do think there are better ones these days. Some of the lexicon has changed and there are topics covered in a modern Calculus textbook that aren't covered in the original book (that I personally think are worthwhile spending time on). The updated version with Martin Gardner does have blurbs where necessary to point it out. The Kline book is a MUCH larger read, but is what I would recommend if you want a reasonably priced Calculus book that's easy to grok. Otherwise, I think it's hard to go wrong w/ the Stewart books. Work through the problems as they do in the book, you will come away w/ what you need. Finally, if you want a whirlwind tour, Calculus for Dummies by Mark Ryan is great.

Time spent learning Calculus is worthwhile; and if nothing else, understand the fundamental theorem. Overwhelmingly impressive.

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#142

I'm embarassed somewhat to say this, but over the past few weeks I've been taking the courses on Khan Academy on mathematics. I'm nearly 30. and I'm not talking about brushing up on my linear algebra, that comes later, I'm talking high school level mathematics, stuff that I've largely forgotten or didn't "get" first time round. I've seen these "machine learning for hackers!" articles who try to dish out a bit of math…

My hat is off to you. I did the same thing, mastering something like 85% of the material in the Mathematics area of Khan Academy before finally just enrolling at a university part-time to go deeper. Now that you're older you'll be better able to pause at moments and reflect on the deeper meaning of some of the thing you're learning. Enjoy!!!

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has their own philosophy of mathematics. To me, the core idea is the idea of representations, such that those representations allow you to extract patterns (aka similarity or commonality) from various cases.

Aren't metaphors and analogies representations that allow us to extract patterns?

To me, metaphors and analogies are about trying to learn some new concept(s) in terms of already known and familiar concepts.

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#145
post #117

In my experience, everything is easy if you DON'T try to learn it using analogies and metaphors.

I think that is a very "mathematician" thing to say; my own experience of doing mathematics is largely in accord. A little experience of teaching mathematics shows that this doesn't work for most people.

IMHO the best way to teach any concept is to start with a problem or question that can eventually be solved using the concept. Start with the question in general terms but don't provide the answer, let people think about it, make it engaging conversation and slowly and steadily build the concept that leads to the solution.

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#146
post #6

That PDF is just a bunch of scanned images of the book. It's large and cumbersome in many readers. There is a much better PDF at Project Gutenberg [1]. The Gutenberg PDF is only 1.9 MB, compared to 12 MB for the scanned image PDF. The Gutenberg page for this book [2] also has a link to the LaTeX source for the PDF. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf [2] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283

And here's the github hosted version because gutenberg seems to be freaking out right now: https://github.com/nadvornix/calculus-made-easy/blob/master/...

Seems to be an ipv6 connection problem; if you add gutenberg.org to network.dns.ipv4OnlyDomains in firefox it works fine.

Weirdly, I can telnet to port 80 & GET / on the ipv6 address just fine.

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#147

In my experience, everything is easy if you DON'T try to learn it using analogies and metaphors.

The latest research on how we learn and how the brain works places great importance on analogy as a learning tool.

Any references to such research?

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, a DjVu of that scan is about 1.4MB. On my phone I can't spot the difference. It's a shame that format never caught on. [1] http://any2djvu.djvu.org/djvu/170421/82.132.237.218/57676.17...

Warning: Attempting to open this file in ebook software stalled my decently-specced Android phone for about a minute until the software crashed.

Must be something with the program you are using. I've just opened the file on my WP10 device with ancient Snapdragon 400 and I don't see any problem with reading, scrolling etc.

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, a DjVu of that scan is about 1.4MB. On my phone I can't spot the difference. It's a shame that format never caught on. [1] http://any2djvu.djvu.org/djvu/170421/82.132.237.218/57676.17...

Warning: Attempting to open this file in ebook software stalled my decently-specced Android phone for about a minute until the software crashed.

Huh. Sorry about that. EBookDroid on my 2013-era Android loaded it fine in about 1 second for the first page.

(I included the link in case anyone was interested in the quality and to prove I didn't just make up the number!)

Re: Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With an affiliate link nice

That was my guess too, but this one actually isn't. Amazon uses "?ref" for reference (innocuous), and "?tag" for affiliates. For quick reference, a.co and amzn.com are official shorteners and considered safe. amzn.to links however are third-party and often used to conceal affiliate links.

You're right. Missed that, my bad.
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