January 15, 2013

Stay Cool with Calculus - Part 2

Some time in August 2012, or earlier.

We were doing Calculus just to test how cool my Primary 5 son can be in the face of some supposedly "scary" problems.

And we were looking for a kid-friendly introductory book.

We ran into lots of tough, heavy books and I lost my cool.

A subject that is beautiful, still useful in many disciplines(described better here in "Calculus Made Easy" the 1998 Edition's introduction by Martin Gardner)















A subject that has been taught for decades ...

But a subject which has been sort of superseded by other branches of maths, in particular by discrete maths ...

Still here we find calculus books getting thicker, heavier and more inaccessible to outsiders. Again the explanation comes in Martin Gardner's introduction:














Are we going to find the kind of book that suit our needs:  just 2 or 3 inspiring real-life problems, 2 or 3 simple formulas or procedures, just 1 or 2 hours?

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