Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson

From Calculus Made Easy.org:

What one fool can do, another can.

(Ancient Simian Proverb.)

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• I. To Deliver You From The Preliminary Terrors
• II. On Different Degrees of Smallness
• III. On Relative Growings
• IV. Simplest Cases
• V. Next Stage. What to do with Constants
• VI. Sums, Differences, Products and Quotients
• VII. Successive Differentiation
• VIII. When Time Varies
• IX. Introducing a Useful Dodge
• X. Geometrical Meaning of Differentiation

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Prologue

Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.
Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics — and they are mostly clever fools — seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.
Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.

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