Lectures on Calculus

content typical

writing substandard

This book is from a set of lectures on calculus given by visiting professor Evgeny Shchepin at Uppsala University in 2001. The first obstacle potential readers will encounter is that the book is provided in PostScript format, with hideous bitmapped type 3 fonts embedded. This makes it virtually impossible to view the book on a monitor in any legible representation, although it looks fine when you print it out. The typical Windows or MacOS user will give up long before that point. This is a shame, because it's not at all difficult these days to get LaTeX to output Adobe Acrobat files that are viewable on virtually any computer, and are legible on the screen. There is no index, and virtually no graphs or other figures.

The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written. This deep, dark forest of mathematical symbols, interspersed with ungrammatical English, is meant to follow the historical development of the subject, but it never makes it clear why the historical route is the right one to follow. There are many seemingly pointless digressions.

Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course? The presence of end-of-chapter homework problems would seem to imply that it was. If so, I feel sorry for them. Although it's cute that the author manages to develop integrals before limits, and derivatives only at the very end, I somehow doubt that real, live students would read this book and exclaim, "We sure are lucky to be learning calculus using this novel order of topics!" Most of the problems begin with the words "Prove that...," and neither the text nor the problems give any of the standard applications to biology, physics, economics, etc.

Information wants to be free, so make some free information.

The above review is copyrighted by its author, and is copylefted under the following license:
Open Publication License 1.0 without options A or B

Re: Who is going to use this? (THIS IS NOT A FRESHMAN CALCULUS TEXT) by dradetsky on 2004-11-07 16:48:04, review #430

First of all, I had no problem reading the text. It looks as nice as anything that comes out of LaTeX. However, perhaps this is because I am using GNU/Linux. Anyhow, I think Mr. Crowell is (understandably) misinterpreting the use of the word "Calculus." Crowell writes: "The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written...Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course?" Of course not. Consider, for example, that a number of universities call their introductory real analysis class "Advanced Calculus." This is clearly an advanced text, and compared with other advanced texts, is not particularly terse. It's not wonderful, either, but it is wrong to hold it to the standards of the introductory texts which it obviously isn't.
The above comment is copyrighted by its author, and is copylefted under the following license:
Open Publication License 1.0 without options A or B

Re: Re: Who is going to use this? (THIS IS NOT A FRESHMAN CALCULUS TEX by Ben Crowell (crowell09 at stopspam.lightandmatter.com (change 09 to current year)) on 2004-11-07 20:04:18, review #432 http://www.lightandmatter.com

First of all, I had no problem reading the text. It looks as nice as anything that comes out of LaTeX. However, perhaps this is because I am using GNU/Linux.
I'm using FreeBSD, and it looked bad in the reader I was using (probably the Linux version of Acrobat Reader, running under emulation mode). It's perfectly possible to use latex or pdftex to make pdf files that look good in all readers, but the author simply hasn't bothered to do it.

This is clearly an advanced text...
I think you're right, I was probably off-base there.

... and compared with other advanced texts, is not particularly terse.
The book is just not written at a decent level of English literacy. Even if the grammatical errors were fixed, it would still be a very dry, dull piece of writing, and just because many books are badly written, that's no excuse for bringing another badly written book into the world.

Information wants to be free, so make some free information.

The above comment is copyrighted by its author, and is copylefted under the following license:
Open Publication License 1.0 without options A or B

The contents of this web page, except the parts contributed by members of The Assayer, are copyright (c) 2000 by Benjamin Crowell, and are copyleft licensed under the Open Publication License 1.0, without options A or B.