Calculus the Easy Way

by Douglas Downing

Clear instruction in derivatives, integrals, exponential functions, differential equations, and much more—made entertaining in the form of a fantasy novel. Covers all essential first-year calculus topics. Books in the Easy Way Series are ideal students self-help supplements. They offer valuable overviews of course work and extra help with difficult subject areas.

Genres: Mathematics, Nonfiction, Textbooks, Reference, Calculus

323 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Douglas Downing is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Seattle Pacific University, where he taught from 1983 to 2018. He holds a BS and a PhD in economics from Yale University. At SPU, he taught economics, quantitative methods, astronomy, and globalization. Dr. Downing also served in various leadership roles and authored 15 books, including a trilogy of math adventure novels. His 2015 book, Freedom, Opportunity, and Security, explores the relationship between economic policy and the political system.

Reviews

[May Ling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly the best way to learn calculus on your own. Told in very simple stories, Calculus the easy reduces calculus to a series of obvious algebraic equations.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is quite strong at the beginning. Its explanations are lengthy and detailed, enabling the reader to grasp the algebra of what is going on.

As you move through the book, however, it does get much much weaker. I found myself confused as to how Centers of Mass are to be computed. Its introduction to Differentials is absolutely abysmal and I felt like some of my students(give me the formula!), yet unable to really understand what I was doing. I'm glad this was just a review before breaking into my old textbooks. I do feel that I've learned several tricks and have a better grasp on some ideas (such as Partial Fractions and Trigonometric Substitution) but definitely need a different explanation for the more difficult concepts.

I do like that the all the questions are answered in the back (versus just the evens), but more than once I wanted to know how they got their answer that was totally different from mine, rather than just THAT the answer was different.

In the end, it was good for Calculus 1. I would certainly use some chapters when I tutor in the future.

[McLean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun book. It's a single variable calculus textbook, but written as a fantasy novel. The quality of the story is nothing remarkable in and of itself (and sometimes gets to feeling awfully childish), but the author uses the narrative structure to present an inductive approach to learning calculus, rather than the traditional deductive approach. Instead of giving a theorem and then demonstration potential applications, we're presented with a problem, and then see the characters in the story work through how they would solve the problem. This both helps to motivate the usefulness of the material, and, by showing where these methods come from, helps students to develop an intuitive understanding of the concepts.

[Lee]

I need to take a calculus class, so I decided to go through this book to supplement the class text. The book is aimed at high school students, but the descriptions are plainly written and written in detail. I'm pretty hopeful that this book will help me learn calculus so I don't end up just memorizing information.