At last on day 113, I dive in into Calculus. What I write bellow is my interpretation of what I have read me researched. If you are using this post as reference, I suggest you double check my statements. I am by no means a reference source on calculus, just another student trying to learn it.
Calculus, from what I have learned far, seems to be the study of change. It deals mostly with two major subjects differentiation and integration. If fact I finds some sources that specifically reference differential calculus versus integral calculus.
If I use Professor Edward Burger's approach to explain calculus from one his Thinkwell videos, then calculus is the mathematical discipline created to answer two mayor questions: What is the instantaneous velocity of an object? And What is the area or volume of an exotically-shaped object? The first question is in the realm of diffential calculus and the second belongs to integral calculus.
All courses I am reviewing right now, start with differential calculus.
In differential calculus I read that the original question that started the discipline was finding the slope of tangent line of a curve. I found this surprising because I remember drawing or working with tangent lines and alopes back in intermediate school geometry. However, when I read deeper I was blown away with the reason the slope of a tangent was such a problem.
A tangent is a line that intersects an object, like a circle or a curve, at one (and only one) point. That's the rub. Way back in my geometry class, I learned that you needed at least two points to make a line. The difference between this two point will give us the rise and run of the line, which is its slope. So how can Impossibly find the slope of a tangent line to a curve if a tangent is only one point? The answer, learn calculus. The short answer, and the heart of all calculus it seems, is to find another point in the curve that is sooooooooooooooo close to the first point that the distance between them is infinitesimal and therefore negligible.
In The chart opposite, as point point B in the curve get closer and closer to point A that is also in the curve, the line that passes through them looks more and more like the tangent of the curve.
Now imagine the curve actually represents a car's velocity traveling on a straight line. Then point A is we're the car is at time x. In algebra we can find the average velocity between A and B1 by subtracting the miles traveled by the time taken to travel those miles. However, how can I find the exact velocity (Instantaneous velocity) of the car at point A? If I make the time interval between A and B small enough as to make close to an instant, then I can Algebraically compute an approximation of instantaneous velocity.
In integral calculus, the questions searched are a little different.
What is the area of an exotic shape? And from what I have studied, exotic shapes just mean shapes other than the ones we have formulas for. We have formulas for squares, circles, triangles, cubes, spheres, pyramids and if my memory doesn't fail me, cones. I bet we also have formulas for many other shapes, but how about the area of the shape in the chart below.
How do we measure this shape's area?
Well, we could inscribe it in a grid of squares of a given size and count the squares that the shape fills.That would give us an approximation of the area we are looking for.
If we start to make the squares smaller and smaller, more of the shape is inscribed within it.
We can repeat the process of making the squares smaller and smaller, to get better approximations. If we make those squares infinitely small, the value of the area of the shape will be so close to its real area that the difference would be negligible.
Therefore, the previous act of getting the tangent of the curve and now the act of getting the area of an exotic shape, relied on the same procedure to get answered. We used infinitesimally small numbers. In fact, I have run across various references to calculus as infinitesimal calculus. If we want to make the jump from algebra, which can only give us approximations of the answers to these questions, to calculus , where we can get the exact answers we are looking for, we must go through Limits.
And so must I, next time.
What do to think?
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