Preface Notes for Students
Hi! Thanks so much for reading this book! I hope it’s a good and useful tool for you as you learn calculus. Before you dive into it, I want to try to explain some of the choices I made in putting this book together and how I hope you’ll use it.
First, let’s talk about all of the activities. In each section you’ll find activities that lead into things like definitions or theorems. These are activities that I give my students to work on in groups. If you’re using this independently, I hope you still engage with the activities: think about them, try to use them as ways of exploring the results or definitions before we state them. I want you to build intuition and I hope that these activities are helpful, even without the group exploration that would normally happen with them.
You might also notice that there aren’t many proofs in this book. That’s not extremely unique for an introductory calculus book, but there might be even fewer than expected. The ones that are included are ones that I think are important. Most of the included proofs show some of the kind of reasoning that we want students in calculus classes to see.
The last thing that I’ll say is that I hope, most of all, that however you use this book and whatever parts of it you engage in, that it is useful for you. I hope that it helps you as you work to understand these wonderful groups of topics.
Thanks for letting me and my book be a part of your journey learning mathematics!
