Age: 16+ High School Full Credit
In Calculus for Everyone, Dr. Mitch Stokes presents the mathematics of change in an extremely effective way for anyone with a first-year course in algebra.
Based on more than a decade of classroom experience, this book provides mastery of calculus’s core by focusing on the foundational concepts of limits, derivatives, and integrals, explaining how all three are united in the fundamental theorem of calculus.
Moreover, Calculus for Everyone explains how the story of calculus is central to Western culture, from Plato in ancient Greece, to today’s modern physics. Indeed, this book explains why calculus is needed at all—and why it is needed so badly. By mastering the core of calculus—as well as seeing its meaning and significance—students will not only better understand math and science in general, but contemporary culture and their place in it.
Dr. Mitch Stokes presents the mathematics of change in an extremely effective way for anyone with a first-year course in algebra. Yet it does so without dumbing calculus down. It represents one of the first tangible steps in recent years at reunifying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) with the liberal arts. The goal is to produce a generation of classically educated students who understand the history of math, and will be better equipped to solve problems like our current crisis in Physics.
Beautifully designed with over 600 hand-drawn illustrations in the textbook and a video curriculum with hand-drawn exercises walking students methodically through the course, this curriculum seeks to mend the broken relationship between the liberal arts and STEM, between science and the humanities.
Course Objectives:
- Learn to use concept of integration to evaluate geometric area and solve other applied problems.
- Learn about the need for calculus and its historical development.
- Learn the general concept of function and its applications to real-world situations.
- Learn to work with algebraic functions and their applications in applied problems.
- Learn the concepts of the derivative and its underlying concepts.
- Learn to calculate derivative for various type of functions using definition and rules.
- Apply the concept of derivative to completely analyze graph of a function.
- Learn about various applications of the derivative
- Learn about anti-derivative and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and its applications.
- 32 videos
Physical Books Required (purchased separately):
- Main student textbook (hardback, 490 pages)
- Exercise Solutions (paperback, 149 pages)
See the Materials tab above for more details.
The only prerequisite for this course is a very basic understanding of Algebra 1. The student should, for example, be familiar with polynomials and be able to manipulate such polynomials (e.g., by combining like terms and manipulating exponents).
The focus of the textbook is on the concepts of calculus proper and not on calculus’s further application to increasingly complicated functions, such as rational, trigonometric, exponential, or logarithmic functions. By keeping to polynomials throughout the course (or, more accurately, to power functions), the student will better identify what is the “calculus part” of calculus.
Once the concepts of calculus have been mastered, then students can—if they choose—go on to apply those concepts in ever more complicated ways. By better understanding what calculus is not, the student will better understand what it is.
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Purchase the Calculus for Everyone textbook and exercise solutions guide here.
Course Content
About Instructor
Mitch Stokes
Dr. Stokes (PhD, Notre Dame) is a senior fellow of philosophy at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. In addition to studying philosophy under world-renowned philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Stokes holds degrees in philosophy, religion and mechanical engineering, and holds five patents in aeroderivative gas turbine technology. He is the author of Calculus for Everyone (Roman Roads Press), books on apologetics, and biographies of Newton and Galileo.
2 Courses
