[Feature photo above by Olga Lednichenko via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).]
This week I have a series of quotes about calculus from my first two years of blogging. The posts were so short that I won’t bother to link you back to them, but math humor keeps well over the years, and W. W. Sawyer is (as always) insightful.
I hope you enjoy this “Throw-back Thursday” blast from the Let’s Play Math! blog archives:
Finding the Limit
Eldest daughter had her first calculus lesson last night: finding the limit as delta-t approached zero. The teacher found the speed of a car at a given point by using the distance function, calculating the average speed over shorter and shorter time intervals. Dd summarized the lesson for me:
“If you want to divide by zero, you have to sneak up on it from behind.”
Harmonic Series Quotation
This kicked off my week with a laugh:
Today I said to the calculus students, “I know, you’re looking at this series and you don’t see what I’m warning you about. You look and it and you think, ‘I trust this series. I would take candy from this series. I would get in a car with this series.’ But I’m going to warn you, this series is out to get you. Always remember: The harmonic series diverges. Never forget it.”
—Rudbeckia Hirta
Learning Curves Blog: The Harmonic Series
quoting Alexandre Borovik
So You Think You Know Calculus?
Rudbeckia Hirta has a great idea for a new TV blockbuster:
Common Sense and Calculus
And here’s a quick quote from W. W. Sawyer’s Mathematician’s Delight:
If you cannot see what the exact speed is, begin to ask questions. Silly ones are the best to begin with. Is the speed a million miles an hour? Or one inch a century? Somewhere between these limits. Good. We now know something about the speed. Begin to bring the limits in, and see how close together they can be brought.
Study your own methods of thought. How do you know that the speed is less than a million miles an hour? What method, in fact, are you unconsciously using to estimate speed? Can this method be applied to get closer estimates?
You know what speed is. You would not believe a man who claimed to walk at 5 miles an hour, but took 3 hours to walk 6 miles. You have only to apply the same common sense to stones rolling down hillsides, and the calculus is at your command.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 