I’m fighting ignorance here(my own, one brain cell at a time).
I never got to grips with calculus either at school (where I failed my Maths O Level), or when I returned to adult education (where I passed with a B (but calculus didn’t happen to appear in the exam paper)).
It still bugs me that I never understood it and I want to change that.
I could waste time explaining how far I got before it all became nonsense, but I think it would be better to assume that I am a complete beginner.
Can anyone recommend a good online tutorial or a good book on the subject? - It does need to begin from absolute basics.
After forgetting nearly all the calculus I had learned twenty-five years ago, I gathered a few books on the topic with the intention of doing some serious brushing up. For simple exposition in small, easy chunks, my favorite is Quick Calculus by Daniel Kleppner and Norman Ramsey. It’s especially designed for self-instruction, and I found it very effective. I have also acquired the well-known Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson, but I find that I’m just not reading very far into it, even though the style is a hoot.
After winding up the Kleppner and Ramsey, I returned to my old college textbook, Calculus by Lynn Loomis, but any text in wide use should do for your use. Start with the easy exercises, and just do lots of them. It’s so tempting to skip the ones you already understand, but repetition of simple skills is very important. The hard exercises will be less hard only when the easy exercises are quite automatic.
The University of Arizona has some software you might like to check out. I downloaded the “Are You Ready for Calculus I?” and “Are You Ready for Ordinary Differential Equations?”. (The answers were Yes and No, respectively.) Or, try the University of New Brunswick version.
Honestly, unless you either need to learn it, or have a really strong desire, calculus isn’t worth the effort that most people need to put forth to learn it. IMO, your time would be better spent studying practical math for computer programming–algorithms, combinatorics, logic, computation theory, and all that.
I prefer set theory and discrete mathematics myself. Probability is interesting as well. Makes you look twice at all those statistics people keep throwing at you.
I’m just conscious that it defeated me at school and college; I mean to reclaim the battle. Masochistic perhaps, but at the moment, it seems like something that everybody else takes for granted, but I can’t do; like I’m the only one who can’t see in colour or something.
IMHO you should get a tutor. A one-on-one tutor. A real live person who will give you assignments, set deadlines, make sure you don’t give up, and explain it to you at a convenient pace.
I’m curious how much calculus you would consider to be calculus. Potentially there are years’ worth of hard-core study in there, but I’m quite sure you’ve no intention of going quite that far.
If you want the simple version, try an A-level text book. I used Bostock and Chandler at school and found it very good.
I’d recommend Lett’s Study Guide for A-level maths as it is suprisingly comphrehensive and includes explantions. Also i did the higher tier GCSE which included some calculus, so a GCSE study guide should include some calculus as well.
Mangetout,
Brush up your trig, geometry, and algebra before attempting calculus. The concepts of calculus are not that bad, its the actual working of the problems in my opinion. Integrating and derivating equations that have some trig in them gets messy quick.
Frankly, I think the trig scares most people away as those equations begin to look seriously daunting!
Good luck,
cj
You might benefit from checking out the book Calculus and Pizza by Clifford Pickover. I thumed through it and it may be okay for a beginner. You may profit from spending some time at the library with it. If it interests you, maybe try reading it twice: once through quickly without really bothering to get the stuff you don’t understand, then a second time when you have a better “big picture” in your mind so that you can go into it more intensively.
I was a straight D math student my whole life. Then I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in economics and I became a B average math student. One difference was having a compelling motivation, I think. Another difference was that I had studied so much economics that doing calculus was filling in the details behind the curves I was already so familiar with. Maybe you could find a round-a-bout way like that. Get an intuitive understanding of something that is really built on a calculus heavy skeleton. That way as you start learning the calculus, you can put it into a context that you already understand.
The basic idea behind calculus is really amazingly simple; so simple that it is somewhat suprising that it took so long for us to come up with it.
I think a final thing is to realize that you can learn it. I think that pretty much anybody can learn calculus, at least enough to grasp some basic econ. and physics and stuff. That’s not to say that it is easy. I suppose that just about anybody could run a 6 minute mile. But it’ll take a lot of practice and training. People who are good at math aren’t that way because they’re smart. I tend to think that they are good at math for the same reason that some people are strong: they exercise their “muscles”. I have total confidence in you!
I feel your pain, same thing happened to me in highschool. I ended up taking it again in summer school, which translated into 5 hours of calculus every day for a month and a half, and I ended up with a 94% grade…
And I had forgotten it all by the time I started university 2 weeks later. My theory is that there are some people who can understand calculus, and some people who just can’t.
I don’t think calculus is that bad. If you don’t know your trig and algebra really well then you are gonna have a very difficult time. Kinda strange but I didn’t truly understand algebra and trig until after calc.
I think you should learn calculus. Everyone who is capable of learning it should learn it. A sound understanding of calculus changes the way you look at things. You develop an intuitive understanding of how things change. You start to undertand a lot of things that go on around you in different ways. It’s mind expanding.