The Gist of Calculus

If you are actually bothering to read this book it is likely that the traditional approach to calculus education confused you as much as it confused me. Calculus can be taught in many different ways and the geometric approach made the most sense to me but I never encountered it in my course of study. I was taught the detailed minutia of calculus in my classes but the geometry that underlies the core of Calculus was never be explained to me. I was simply given formulas that seemed to have descended from the heavens and was taught to eventually accept them on good faith as an unquestionable truth and then told to perform operations with them in hopes that somehow I will eventually understand calculus by memorizing these formulas. This encounter with a faith based approach to calculus left me with a lingering sense that the math department has betrayed the principles of reason upon which the mathematics was built. The stunning simplicity and beauty of the basic derivatives was cruelly hidden from me at the time. This book will try to give you a visual representation of what some of the basic derivatives are all about. Your regular classes and the books used to teach them will provide you with all of the practical applications, quiz material, homework questions and other far more boring bits that belong in a proper Calculus book. This book strictly concerns itself with the core ideas that form the geometric backbone of calculus.