Calculus Made Easy
Francis Weston Sears
22 people recommended it in 16 threads, 2011–2026.
What people on Hacker News said
Contrary to the title and the small size of this book, it's an amazing and intuitive.
Much later, I came across Calculus Made Easy on Project Gutenberg, a textbook from 1914 that actually helped me to understand why calculus works, instead of just treating it like magic.
Really, my favorite gentle calculus textbook has been one I recently was Thompson's "Calculus Made Easy."
They both have a style that is approachable and helped me build an intuition for the material unlike anything else I found.
Chapter 1 is probably the best mathematics chapter I have ever read [0].
I did horribly in math because I figured it was hard and just accepted I'd never be good at it. That quote somehow managed to dissolve my mental block.
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