Intuitive Infinitesimal Calculus

  • An original calculus textbook written in accordance with our unique teaching philosophy.
  • Always gives the most illuminating and satisfying proofs possible, while standard books obscure key ideas under mountains of pedantic formalism.
  • Focus on aha-that’s-why explanations, often using visual and intuitive reasoning, while standard books prefer opaque formula-crunching.
  • Full of fascinating problems, not boring obstacle-course drills.
  • Topics are carefully motivated, not taught “because I say so.”
  • Develops applications fully from first principles, so that you can reach genuine insight, instead of just giving you formulas to plug numbers into like a circus monkey doing tricks for a banana.
  • Sticks to essentials instead of burying key concepts under rambling prose and bloat content.
  • Uses a worksheet-style format for clean and clear presentation and active reader engagement.
  • Reference summary at end of each chapter gives you “everything you need to know for the test” in quick-and-dirty, cheat-sheet form, including step-by-step solution plans for standard problem types. Other textbooks expect you to somehow extract this information for yourself from running text and examples, even though they always mingle it with a bunch of useless crap you don’t need.
  • Illuminated by unique historical perspective and expertise, as the author did his Ph.D. on the history of the calculus.
  • A free calculus textbook. Don’t give hundreds of dollars to bloodsucking parasites publishing corporations.
  • See also blog posts on calculus teaching.