Calculus Made Easy (Free book)

OK, it looks old and dusty, but Calculus Made Easy [PDF] is an excellent book and I strongly recommend it to those of you who are struggling with calculus concepts. It’s also great for teachers, to give you ideas on how to explain calculus so I doesn’t confuse the hell out of everyone. He quite rightly points out that many math text book writers are more interested in impressing the reader with sophisticated calculus techniques than explaining the basic concepts.

One of the early pages has:

BEING A VERY-SIMPLEST INTRODUCTION TO
THOSE BEAUTIFUL METHODS OF RECKONING
WHICH ARE GENERALLY CALLED BY THE
TERRIFYING NAMES OF THE
DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS
AND THE
INTEGRAL CALCULUS.
BY
SILVANUS P. THOMPSON

In other words, this was one of the first ever “Calculus for Dummies” books. Thompson puts great effort into explaining what is going on, rather than jumping straight into the calculations. He humbly calls himself a “fool”, but doesn’t treat the reader as one.

To give you an idea of how the book is written, in Chapter 1, “To Deliver You From the Preliminary Terrors”, we read:

∫ which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “the sum of.” Thus ∫dx means the sum of all the little bits of x; or ∫dt means the sum of all the little bits of t. Ordinary mathematicians call this symbol “the integral of”.

Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dx’s, (which is the same thing as the whole of x). The word “integral” simply means “the whole”.

The book is now copyright free. Grab the PDF: Calculus Made Easy.

[Thanks to Denise at LetsPlayMath for the link.]

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Posted in Learning, Mathematics - April 25th, 2009.

14 Comments on “Calculus Made Easy (Free book)”

  1. solarhene Says:
    26 Apr 2009 at 12:52 pm Link to this comment

    thanks so much for sharing this excellent book!

    best regards,
    an old fool

  2. zac Says:
    26 Apr 2009 at 12:56 pm Link to this comment

    You’re welcome Solarhene. I’m glad that you find it useful.

  3. ayuk federick besong Says:
    26 Apr 2009 at 8:45 pm Link to this comment

    i believe it can work and it will work

  4. Noor Says:
    27 Apr 2009 at 9:59 pm Link to this comment

    I’m so interested in re-learning calculus that I watched many different video tutorials, but I found this book summarizing Integral Calculus in its first 2 pages!

    Thank you so much!

  5. Sarah Says:
    3 May 2009 at 2:05 pm Link to this comment

    Thanks so much for posting this. I’m so glad I clicked on your link while viewing my friend Dana’s blog. My 9 year old read it and was very excited that it made so much sense. He’s currently taking Physics and some of the math problems were made to be so confusing so this will help him so much.

  6. lawal Says:
    10 May 2009 at 12:55 am Link to this comment

    Good DAY SIR,i want to know how i can get this text book,calculus made easy.i am mailing from Lagos Nigeria.thank u sir.

  7. zac Says:
    10 May 2009 at 7:49 am Link to this comment

    Hi Lawal

    This is an e-book in PDF form (not a physical book). The link is in the article above, in the first line.

    You could print it out from the PDF if you would rather hard copy.

  8. D. Pal, India. Says:
    30 Jun 2009 at 7:36 pm Link to this comment

    Its a brilliant book. Thanks for sharing the book

  9. B Atchley Says:
    9 Jul 2009 at 9:27 pm Link to this comment

    Thanks for sharing this book! It will be a great tool for my independent study students!

  10. Winstone Kapanje Says:
    25 Aug 2009 at 2:29 pm Link to this comment

    Thanks for great job well done. Do the same with other topics such as trigonometry and complex numbers

  11. Judith Kanyama Chikoti Says:
    28 Aug 2009 at 1:54 am Link to this comment

    the way you have started culculus is very interesting but how could one get the whole PDF paper?

  12. zac Says:
    28 Aug 2009 at 11:05 am Link to this comment

    Hi Judith. The link to the PDF is in the article above! Do you mean that you want a hard copy? You would need to print it yourself.

  13. jared okoth Says:
    2 Sep 2009 at 7:20 pm Link to this comment

    if every mathematics topic could be introduced the way this has, then i sure no one will think of maths as the hardest of courses.

  14. eduardo Says:
    17 Sep 2009 at 5:34 am Link to this comment

    make me realize the math is easy

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