The Cartoon Introduction to Calculus

Book excerpt: The internationally bestselling authors of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics return to make calculus fun The award-winning illustrator Grady Klein has teamed up once again with the world’s only stand-up economist, Yoram Bauman, Ph.D., to take on the daunting subject of calculus. A supplement to traditional textbooks, The Cartoon Introduction to Calculus focuses on the big ideas rather than all the formulas you have to memorize. With Klein and Bauman as our guides, we scale the dual peaks of Mount Derivative and Mount Integral, and from their summits, we see how calculus relates to the rest of mathematics. Beginning with the problems of speed and area, Klein and Bauman show how the discipline is unified by a fundamental theorem. We meet geniuses like Archimedes, Liu Hui, and Bonaventura Cavalieri, who survived the slopes on intuition but prepared us for the avalanche-like dangers posed by mathematical rigor. Then we trek onward and scramble through limits and extreme values, optimization and integration, and learn how calculus can be applied to economics, physics, and so much more. We discover that calculus isn’t the pinnacle of mathematics after all, but its tools are foundational to everything that follows. Klein and Bauman round out the book with a handy glossary of symbols and terms, so you don’t have to worry about mixing up constants and constraints. With a witty and engaging narrative full of jokes and insights, The Cartoon Introduction to Calculus is an essential primer for students or for anyone who is curious about math.