If you had the traditional engineering education, you’ve made your peace with calculus. If you haven’t, you may have learned it on your own, but for many people, calculus has a reputation for being super difficult. While some of the details can be very tricky, the core concepts are actually simple and [Mathologer] has a very simple explanation along with some good graphics that can help you get started on calculus mastery if you’ve been putting it off. Using a car on the highway as the prototypical example, he covers quite a bit of ground in the 30 minute video that you can see below.
Of course, this isn’t a unique idea that calculus is actually simple. The video credits the great book “Calculus Made Easy” that we’ve talked about before. That 100-year-old (and then some) book has a similar approach to the topic.
Unlike a lot of similar videos, this one covers more complex things like various rules and the integral and derivative of trig functions and logarithms. It presents them in a colorful graphic that might be easier to digest than a dry table.
Of course, tying your shoes and algebra are also easy unless you don’t know how to do them. But it is funny how many students struggle with the subject when it is possible to have a straightforward intuitive understanding of it very quickly.
Do you remember the scene in “Something About Mary” where the hitchhiker becomes upset that his “7 minute abs” video might be displaced by “6 minute abs?” If that resonates with you, you could try this decidedly less tranquil video that purports to teach calculus in 20 minutes. We’ve even done our own attempt at making it easy.
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