A revision of the best selling innovative Calculus text on the market. Functions are presented graphically, numerically, algebraically, and verbally to give readers the benefit of alternate interpretations. The text is problem driven with exceptional exercises based on real world applications from engineering, physics, life sciences, and economics.
FREE Two-Day Shipping for Students. Learn more |
|
There is a newer edition of this item:
|
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
A revision of the best selling innovative Calculus text on the market. Functions are presented graphically, numerically, algebraically, and verbally to give readers the benefit of alternate interpretations. The text is problem driven with exceptional exercises based on real world applications from engineering, physics, life sciences, and economics. Revised edition features new sections on limits and continuity, limits, l'Hopital's Rule, and relative growth rates, and hyperbolic functions.
About the Author
Deborah Hughes-Hallett, Harvard University
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Pedagogy gone horribly, horribly wrong,
By MS (British Columbia, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Calculus: Single and Multivariable, 2nd Edition (Hardcover)
Teaching with this text - which I've been doing for the past two semesters - is an uphill battle, to say the least. It's a text designed for non-majors; I teach business and social science students. Instructors of these sorts of students need to convince their pupils that they DO need to know how to reason mathematically, and that math IS relevant to their life plans - they can't just rely on their calculators to do all their work for them. When the textbook seems to disagree, our job is all the more difficult.The authors of _Calculus_ don't seem to have made up their minds regarding whether or not it is necessary to introduce the notion of mathematical justification in this book. On the one hand, the examples feature sound arguments for why a curve looks the way it does, or why a critical point is a maximum or minimum - but on the other hand, alongside Newton's Method and the Bisection Method for estimating roots, is a "Using the Zoom Function on Your Calculator" primer on how to estimate the zeroes of functions. Offhand remarks about "and you can use your graphing calculator for this and that" serve to seriously undermine any attempt to explain to first-year students the concept of mathematical argument - which is unfamiliar to many. The organization of the chapters is also somewhat questionable. Differentiation is broken up into two sections: one dealing with the concept of a derivative (complete with pictures), and the other pertaining to computing them. While the idea of introducing differentiation through a concrete example - measuring instantaneous velocity given a displacement function - is a good one, by the time students actually get to work with derivatives, they're no longer focused on what they actually represent. Curve sketching is introduced vaguely at the end of the second chapter - before the shortcuts to differentiation are mentioned - and then revisited only in chapter 4. The section on integration is even worse: again, it's introduced in a concrete manner - this time, by asking how displacement can be computed from a velocity function. But for some bizarre reason, the authors don't take this opportunity to explain that the area under a velocity curve - the integral - is that same displacement function whose derivative was the velocity. It's a perfect opportunity to do so, as it's an interesting and surprising (to the beginner) result, and one that's accessible at this point in the course. But instead, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is relegated to a later section, long after the "integral as an area" idea has been abandoned and students are just working with integrals as antiderivatives. (Even more curiously, there's a section entitled "The Second Fundamental Theorem of Calculus", but none called "The First Fundamental Theorem of Calculus".) I'd highly recommend James Stewart's _Calculus_ instead of this text for a first-year calc course: the material is far better explained, and there's even a section on the inadequacies of graphing calculators (which are expensive, and which most first year students don't have the mathematical background to use properly).
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Look elsewhere,
By A Customer
This review is from: Calculus: Single and Multivariable, 2nd Edition (Hardcover)
I agree with the earlier comment regarding this text which points out its confusing explanations and lack of examples. Even in the case of someone looking to review calculus this text is not at all useful and a very expensive waste of money.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Very Helpful,
By A Customer
This review is from: Calculus: Single and Multivariable, 2nd Edition (Hardcover)
I bought this book to brush up, that's all. I found the examples confusing and the explanations poor, even for someone with experience.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
