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To: e2thex who wrote (21599)8/3/2012 10:34:57 PM
From: ahhahaRead Replies (2) of 23357
 
I don't. I did read "Calculus Made Easy" when I was in 8th grade because it was a book on the library shelf. I had heard calculus was impossibly difficult so I wanted to see for myself. Thompson's book was horrible. No proofs. No deltas. Not even an epsilon delta process. How can a limit be taken without one? The book led me to believe that one could understand calculus with algebra. In high school someone said that a limit represented an infinity of algebraic statements. That's when I knew I was in trouble, and needed to consider going to biz school. Oh, the ignominy. How can you write down an infinity of anything?

I couldn't accept this idea of an infinity of algebraic statements, so I went to the library again and found another book on calculus. This book started with the delta process. It was intuitive. You just algebraically manipulated the difference, the delta, into a form where it would go to zero if made small enough. Ok. I can swallow that, and that's where all that infinitude of well formed formulas resided, in some kind of an abstract place. No matter. The machinery delivered the right answer. That's what we did in high school. Grind out derivatives and integrals.

Then I took Calc1 as an university freshman. I thought I knew it, but I couldn't understand a thing the prof was saying. All this proof stuff with "for every epsilon there exists a delta such that". That's when I knew Thompson had messed me up totally. In desperation, I had to figure out how to generate the right answer. This required inverting a function so that any value it took was always inside some value that was prescribed. All you had to due is invert the function to give that rule. By the time I figured that out the prof was lecturing about Archimedean ordered fields and Rolle's Theorem. I couldn't believe that anyone would waste paper writing down anything as trivially true as Rolle's theorem. Thompson never described any of that.

Calculus can't be made easy but at the university they make it excessively hard. Now, all that stuff is simpleton.
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