Basic Calculus

Basic Calculus by Darel Hardy was published by Brooks/Cole in 1975

The original manuscript for this book was typed on an electric typewriter that had a few special mathematical symbols. I used sheets of rub-off symbols for additional symbols that did not appear on the keyboard. These symbols caused a lot of problems during the production phase because they tended to loosen up and fall off the page. I remember thinking after this book was published how wonderful it would be to have a computer with a dot matrix printer that could be customized to print mathematical symbols.

The only use of computers for this book was to work with Paul Fleming, the Director of the Poudre R-1 School District Computer Center, to use a plotter to create function plots. The graphic artist at Brooks/Cole transformed these plots into formats that could be used for production. One thing I learned from that was that the artist’s rendition was never as good as the original plot. What started off as the beautiful shape of a parabola came back as a rather ugly French curve.

hp25

Basic Calculus was written for a two-semester sequence in single-variable calculus, with integration introduced before differentiation. Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP 25 in 1975, and such scientific calculators seemed to me to make the integration-first approach feasible. The limited success of this book indicates to me that the differentiation-first approach continues to be preferred by my colleagues around the world.

I have been fortunate to have helped write several other books. With home computers and software such as Scientific WorkPlace, writing has become much more convenient and enjoyable.