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I self taught myself calculus at that age (11th grade), obviously had a hard time at first, and persevered by sampling a good half dozen different books till I
by galdosdi 2y ago
I self taught myself calculus at that age (11th grade), obviously had a hard time at first, and persevered by sampling a good half dozen different books till I found one that would make things click. These are my credentials for making the following recommendation:
Get the book Quick Calculus by Kleppner and Ramsey. Nothing else I used came close, for developing intuition about the concepts when they're fresh and new.
Once they have mastered that, any good book will do. James Stewart's is fantastic but so big and thick you may need to use it as a resource to intelligently select appropriate readings and problems from as they go, rather than just start at page 1 and assign every problem. But the main thing is to really get the basics of what a derivative and integral and limit are from the getgo, and nothing I tried compare to Quick Calculus for that.
Using this Julia book or some other similar book to select exercises based on your appropriate judgment from it to supplement Stewart would also be very cool if your student has an interest in programming. Let them complete then in python if they like, python should be fine. I recall implementing a numerical integrator and a symbolic differentiator in python at the same age, as a way of consolidating my knowledge of calculus, and found both to be very valuable and fun exercises. Symbolic differentiation seemed like magic especially, but it was just a matter of parsing and then continually adding rules for each rule I learned in math.
- ultrasounder 2y agoThanks for taking time to answer. This is why I keep coming back to HN. For concrete recommendations based on one’s own experience. Ordered an used Quick calculus.