Horizon Information Portal

HSPLS site

eBooks/Audiobooks

Reading Program

Calculus reordered : a history of the big ideas / David M. Bressoud.

by Bressoud, David M., 1950- author.

View full image

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2019]

Calculus -- History.

Mathematics -- History.

9780691181318 (hardcover) :

0691181314 (hardcover)

xvi, 224 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Chapter 1. accumulation -- Chapter 2. ratios of change -- Chapter 3. sequences of partial sums -- Chapter 4. the algebra of inequalities -- Chapter 5. analysis -- Appendix, reflections on the teaching of calculus -- The last word.

Calculus Reordered takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus grew to what we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the seventeenth century, and how its current structure is based on developments that arose in the nineteenth century. Bressoud argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical development of calculus presents a sounder way for students to learn this fascinating area of mathematics. Delving into calculus's birth in the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean--especially Syracuse in Sicily and Alexandria in Egypt--as well as India and the Islamic Middle East, Bressoud considers how calculus developed in response to essential questions emerging from engineering and astronomy. He looks at how Newton and Leibniz built their work on a flurry of activity that occurred throughout Europe, and how Italian philosophers such as Galileo Galilei played a particularly important role. In describing calculus's evolution, Bressoud reveals problems with the standard ordering of its curriculum: limits, differentiation, integration, and series. He contends instead that the historical order--which follows first integration as accumulation, then differentiation as ratios of change, series as sequences of partial sums, and finally limits as they arise from the algebra of inequalities--makes more sense in the classroom environment. Exploring the motivations behind calculus's discovery, Calculus Reordered highlights how this essential tool of mathematics came to be.

Horizon Information Portal 3.25_9884

Powered by Dynix

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal