Calculus Light (Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 9)

Another Calculus book? As long as students find calculus scary, the failure rate in mathematics is higher than in all other subjects, and as long as most people mistakenly believe that only geniuses can learn and understand mathematics, there will always be room for a new book of Calculus. We call it Calculus Light.This book is designed for a one semester course in "light" calculus – mostly single variable, meant to be used by undergraduate students without a wide mathematical background and who do not major in mathematics but study subjects such as engineering, biology or management information systems. The first chapter contains a historical background of calculus. Every scientific achievement involves people and therefore characterized by victories and disappointments, intrigues and hope. All of these elements exist in the story behind calculus and when you add the time dimension, starting 2400 years ago, it is a saga. We hope the reader enjoys reading this chapter as much as we enjoyed the writing.In addition to classic calculus the book provides tools for practical applications such as Fourier series, Lagrange multipliers and elementary numerical methods.