Welcome
Welcome to Informal Calculus! This book came from teaching Survey of Calculus at the University of Montana Western. You’ll find that this book reflects the needs of that course, which are:
- Intuition behind the main concepts of calculus,
- Short, to-the-point explanations about how to do calculations,
- Build-in review for algebra along the way, with trigonometry not being a pre-requisite, and
- Applications to biology and environmental science, the two main science majors at my university.
A huge thanks to my collaborators for this project: Michelle Anderson who helped with biology ideas, problems, and projects; Rebekah Levine, who assisted with environmental science ideas, problems, and projects; and Debbie Seacrest, who advised on mathematical content and edited the entire book. This work was partially supported by a grant from TRAILS Montana. Thanks to Christina Trunnell for helping with many aspects of this book directly, as well as supporting OER projects all over Montana.
Click on “contents” to start exploring the book.
For Teachers
Feel free to take, change, modify any materials from this book for your own class or other use. If your particularly interested in project ideas, I’ve collected links to the projects in this book below:
