It's Official: Chapter 13 of Thomas' Calculus is stupid

[knox]

Reasons Chapter 13 is stupid:

- It talks about very simple ideas in very complicated ways
- Having built up on the rest of the multivariable calculus in the rest of the book, students discover that their toil and hard work was all to learn how to calculate flux
- Going against all conventions of calculus notation until this point, it considers F(x,y,z) to be a derivative off(x,y,z)
- It leaves the student wondering why he didn't just take a physics class
- The idea of path-independence is presented in a way that absolutely boggles the mind to the point of incomprehension

So yes, Chapter 13 is stupid.

 

[yertle-the-turtle]

A = pi r square

yay!

 

[cybersyd]

Reasons Chapter 13 is stupid:

I attended university in Bologna (Italy) maybe 15 years ago... ...and Calculus was my text for Math's exam.

So after all those years Calculus is still stupid????

 

[blueyedpoet]

that's why i'm a philosophy major.......oh no...Logic!!

 

[JessicaAnn]

Pass the salt.

 

[verte76]

I was a philosophy minor and only had to take an epistemology class, not specifically a logic class. So I ended up fooling with Bishop Berkeley's "Analysis of Perception" for a term paper. Ugh.

 

[anitram]

I had to take one Calculus class at University, got an A-, thanked the Lord and never looked back.

 

[easytiger]

calculus threads