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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas

Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas

Bressoud, David M.

Hardcover

Sports GeneralCalculusGeneral Mathematics

ISBN10: 0691181314
ISBN13: 9780691181318
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Jul 16 2019
Pages: 242
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

How our understanding of calculus has evolved over more than three centuries, how this has shaped the way it is taught in the classroom, and why calculus pedagogy needs to change

Calculus Reordered takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to seventeenth-century figures Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and how its current structure is based on developments that arose in the nineteenth century. Bressoud argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical development of calculus represents a sounder way for students to learn this fascinating area of mathematics.

Delving into calculus's birth in the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean--particularly in Syracuse, Sicily and Alexandria, Egypt--as well as India and the Islamic Middle East, Bressoud considers how calculus developed in response to essential questions emerging from engineering and astronomy. He looks at how Newton and Leibniz built their work on a flurry of activity that occurred throughout Europe, and how Italian philosophers such as Galileo Galilei played a particularly important role. In describing calculus's evolution, Bressoud reveals problems with the standard ordering of its curriculum: limits, differentiation, integration, and series. He contends that the historical order--integration as accumulation, then differentiation as ratios of change, series as sequences of partial sums, and finally limits as they arise from the algebra of inequalities--makes more sense in the classroom environment.

Exploring the motivations behind calculus's discovery, Calculus Reordered highlights how this essential tool of mathematics came to be.

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