PROFESSOR: Hi, I'm Gilbert Strang, and I'm a math
professor at MIT.
And I hope these highlights of calculus will be helpful.
I started the project this year, because the linear
algebra lectures which were in class have been watched by a
lot of people on OpenCourseWare.
And so I looked at what there was for calculus.
And I saw two or three types of things.
One was lectures, sort of very serious, too mathy.
And another was supported by foundations, an effort to make
math look so terrifically exciting and wonderful and
connect with everything.
And yet, I feel a lot of people are taking math
courses, calculus, in high school, in college, and simply
want a little help to see what's the main point.
And maybe that's the idea of these lectures, is to try to
tell you the main point without all the heavy things
that a giant textbook would do, and without all the
practice that you'll get in class, and doing
exercises and so on.
So these are kind of short, but I hope alive.
And if they help, I'm very happy.
So I guess I'm hoping everybody might watch this
who'd like a little help or a second look at calculus, both
high school and college students.
I wanted to capture key ideas that you could use for review
and see new examples and see just coming
from a second person.
That seems to be what succeeds with linear algebra.
The videos are sort of just to add, to supplement what you're
actually seeing in class and in the textbook.
I think of the textbooks as often so large and so many
exercises that it's totally easy to lose the key point,
what's essential about calculus and what is just kind
of routine and practice.
So in short videos, it has to be the essential points, the
three groups of functions, like powers of x, sine and
cosine of x, and e to the x.
If you understand those, you've got the main ideas.
We're starting out with a first group of five videos.
Maybe big picture is the words that we think of for those.
And then that'll be the first group that'll be on
OpenCourseWare.
And then I've done 12 after that, that do sort of the rest
of differential calculus, big words just meaning how to find
the derivative, the slope, the speed.
You'll see in the videos.
And then after that could come integral calculus, if you
think I should.
I don't think of a lot of
prerequisites for these videos.
I guess I'm always hopeful that you could watch them even
if you haven't started calculus, to see what's
coming, what it's about.
I've taught math for a long time, and it's so easy to get
into the course and jump over the opening, the introduction
that tells what's important here.
And that's maybe what these videos are aimed at.
FEMALE SPEAKER: This has been a production of MIT
OpenCourseWare and Gilbert Strang.
Funding for this video was provided by the Lord
Foundation.
To help OCW continue to provide free and open access
to MIT courses, please make a donation at
ocw.mit.edu/donate.