Make: Calculus

1 THE FUNDAMENTAL THEOREM

Isaac Newton developed calculus as a tool to explain physical phenomena, in particular motions of planets. As it turned out, it was also a way to encode how things move and change more generally, from economies to populations of rabbits and foxes. There is a lot of scary-sounding terminology that puts people off, like derivatives, differential equations, and integrals. Too often, it is thought of as something to survive, be tested on, and never address again.

However, the concepts that these are shorthand for are not all that hard, and can give insight into just about anything that changes or moves. There are a few basic relationships that underlie everything else in calculus, one of which is so central that it is ...