num_pages: 118
description: A must for calculus teachers and students.This book gives students the big picture about calculus. It should be read by prospective and current calculus students and by their teachers. Even someone who has completely mastered the technical side of the subject can benefit from being reminded of the essentially simple ideas and the calculational needs that led mathematicians to develop the rather complex machinery of calculus. Sawyer deals with it all, from what background a student needs to begin, to the study of speed and acceleration, to graphing (slope and curvature), to areas, volumes, and the integral. Calculus, invented by Newton and Leibniz in the seventeenth century, has played a decisive role in the development of mathematics and the growth of our present technological society. It is an indispensable tool of both the pure and applied sciences and is one of the cornerstones of modern mathematics. It has provided ways of understanding such phenomena as the velocity of a moving object at any moment, the rate at which moving objects change their speeds and, more generally, the way in which quantities vary as factors affecting them change. In this book, the author tells what calculus is about in simple nontechnical language, understandable to any interested reader. W.W. Sawyer was born in St Ives, Hunts, England in 1911. He attended Highgate School and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he specialized in the mathematics of quantum theory and relativity. He has taught at Leicester College of Technology and has lectured in mathematics at universities in Dundee, Manchester, Ghana, New Zealand, Illinois and Connecticut. In 1965 he became a professor jointly to the departments of mathematics and education at the University of Toronto, retiring in July 1976. His books include Mathematician's Delight, Prelude to Mathematics, A Concrete Approach to Abstract Algebra and An Engineering Approach to Linear Algebra.Content: What must you know to learn about calculus? The study of speed The simplest case of varying speed The higher powers Extending our results Calculus and graphs Acceleration and curvature The reverse problem Circles and spheres, squares and cubes Intuition and logic.
language: English
title: What Is Calculus About?
publisher: Mathematical Association of America