Thank you for reading this short preface. Allow us to share a few key points about the text so that you may better understand what you will find beyond this page.
This text comprises a three-volume series on Calculus. The first part covers material taught in many “Calculus 1” courses: limits, derivatives, and the basics of integration, found in Chapters 1 through 6. The second text covers material often taught in “Calculus 2”: integration and its applications, along with an introduction to sequences, series and Taylor Polynomials, found in Chapters 7 through 10. The third text covers topics common in “Calculus 3” or “Multivariable Calculus”: parametric equations, polar coordinates, vector-valued functions, and functions of more than one variable, found in Chapters 11 through 15. All three are available separately for free.
Printing the entire text as one volume makes for a large, heavy, cumbersome book. One can certainly only print the pages they currently need, but some prefer to have a nice, bound copy of the text. Therefore this text has been split into these three manageable parts, each of which can be purchased separately.
A result of this splitting is that sometimes material is referenced that is not contained in the present text. The context should make it clear whether the “missing” material comes before or after the current portion. Downloading the appropriate pdf, or the entire APEX Calculus LT pdf, will give access to these topics.
Mathematics textbooks have a reputation for being hard to read. High-level mathematical writing often seeks to say much with few words, and this style often seeps into texts of lower-level topics. This book was written with the goal of being easier to read than many other calculus textbooks, without becoming too verbose.
Each chapter and section starts with an introduction of the coming material, hopefully setting the stage for “why you should care,” and ends with a look ahead to see how the just-learned material helps address future problems. Additionally, each chapter includes a section zero, which provides a basic review and practice problems of pre-calculus skills. Since this content is a pre-requisite for calculus, reviewing and mastering these skills are considered your responsibility. This means that it is your responsibility to seek assistance outside of class from your instructor, a math resource center or other math tutoring available on-campus. A solid understanding of these skills is essential to your success in solving calculus problems.
Please read the text; it is written to explain the concepts of Calculus. There are numerous examples to demonstrate the meaning of definitions, the truth of theorems, and the application of mathematical techniques. When you encounter a sentence you don’t understand, read it again. If it still doesn’t make sense, read on anyway, as sometimes confusing sentences are explained by later sentences.
You don’t have to read every equation. The examples generally show “all” the steps needed to solve a problem. Sometimes reading through each step is helpful; sometimes it is confusing. When the steps are illustrating a new technique, one probably should follow each step closely to learn the new technique. When the steps are showing the mathematics needed to find a number to be used later, one can usually skip ahead and see how that number is being used, instead of getting bogged down in reading how the number was found.
Some proofs have been delayed until later (or omitted completely). In mathematics, proving something is always true is extremely important, and entails much more than testing to see if it works twice. However, students often are confused by the details of a proof, or become concerned that they should have been able to construct this proof on their own. To alleviate this potential problem, we do not include the more difficult proofs in the text. The interested reader is highly encouraged to find other proofs online or from their instructor. In most cases, one is very capable of understanding what a theorem means and how to apply it without knowing fully why it is true.
Work through the examples. The best way to learn mathematics is to do it. Reading about it (or watching someone else do it) is a poor substitute. For this reason, every page has a place for you to put your notes so that you can work out the examples. That being said, sometimes it is useful to watch someone work through an example. For this reason, this text also provides links to online videos where someone is working through a similar problem. If you want even more videos, these are generally chosen from
Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/
Math Doctor Bob: http://www.mathdoctorbob.org/
Just Math Tutorials: http://patrickjmt.com/ (unfortunately, they’re not well organized)
Some other sites you may want to consider are
Larry Green’s Calculus Videos: http://www.ltcconline.net/greenl/courses/105/videos/VideoIndex.htm
Mathispower4u: http://www.mathispower4u.com/
Yay Math: http://www.yaymath.org/ (for prerequisite material)
All of these sites are completely free (although some will ask you to donate). Here’s a sample one:
There are many people who deserve recognition for the important role they have played in the development of this text. First, I thank Michelle for her support and encouragement, even as this “project from work” occupied my time and attention at home. Many thanks to Troy Siemers, whose most important contributions extend far beyond the sections he wrote or the 227 figures he coded in Asymptote for 3D interaction. He provided incredible support, advice and encouragement for which I am very grateful. My thanks to Brian Heinold and Dimplekumar Chalishajar for their contributions and to Jennifer Bowen for reading through so much material and providing great feedback early on. Thanks to Troy, Lee Dewald, Dan Joseph, Meagan Herald, Bill Lowe, John David, Vonda Walsh, Geoff Cox, Jessica Libertini and other faculty of VMI who have given me numerous suggestions and corrections based on their experience with teaching from the text. (Special thanks to Troy, Lee & Dan for their patience in teaching Calc III while I was still writing the Calc III material.) Thanks to Randy Cone for encouraging his tutors of VMI’s Open Math Lab to read through the text and check the solutions, and thanks to the tutors for spending their time doing so. A very special thanks to Kristi Brown and Paul Janiczek who took this opportunity far above & beyond what I expected, meticulously checking every solution and carefully reading every example. Their comments have been extraordinarily helpful. I am also thankful for the support provided by Wane Schneiter, who as my Dean provided me with extra time to work on this project. I am blessed to have so many people give of their time to make this book better.
APEX is a consortium of authors who collaborate to produce high-quality, low-cost textbooks. The current textbook-writing paradigm is facing a potential revolution as desktop publishing and electronic formats increase in popularity. However, writing a good textbook is no easy task, as the time requirements alone are substantial. It takes countless hours of work to produce text, write examples and exercises, edit and publish. Through collaboration, however, the cost to any individual can be lessened, allowing us to create texts that we freely distribute electronically and sell in printed form for an incredibly low cost. Having said that, nothing is entirely free; someone always bears some cost. This text “cost” the authors of this book their time, and that was not enough. APEX Calculus would not exist had not the Virginia Military Institute, through a generous Jackson-Hope grant, given the lead author significant time away from teaching so he could focus on this text.
Each text is available as a free .pdf, protected by a Creative Commons Attribution — Noncommercial 4.0 copyright. That means you can give the .pdf to anyone you like, print it in any form you like, and even edit the original content and redistribute it. If you do the latter, you must clearly reference this work and you cannot sell your edited work for money.
We encourage others to adapt this work to fit their own needs. One might add sections that are “missing” or remove sections that your students won’t need. The source files can be found at https://github.com/APEXCalculus.
You can learn more at www.vmi.edu/APEX.
Greg Hartman
Starting with the source at https://github.com/APEXCalculus, faculty at the University of North Dakota made several substantial changes to create APEX Late Transcendentals. The most obvious change was to rearrange the text to delay proving the derivative of transcendental functions until Calculus 2. UND added Sections 7.1 and 7.3, adapted several sections from other resources, created the prerequisite sections, included links to videos and Geogebra, and added several examples and exercises. In the end, every section had some changes (some more substantial than others), resulting in a document that is about 10% longer. The source files can now be found at https://github.com/teepeemm/APEXCalculusLT_Source.
Extra thanks are due to Michael Corral for allowing us to use portions of his Vector Calculus, available at www.mecmath.net/ (specifically, Section 13.9 and the Jacobian in Section 14.7) and to Paul Dawkins for allowing us to use portions of his online math notes from tutorial.math.lamar.edu/ (specifically, Sections 8.5 and 9.7, as well as “Area with Parametric Equations” in Section 10.3). The work on Calculus III was partially supported by the NDUS OER Initiative.
A distinctive feature of APEX is interactive, 3D graphics in the .pdf version. Nearly all graphs of objects in space can be rotated, shifted, and zoomed in/out so the reader can better understand the object illustrated.
Currently, the only pdf viewers that support these 3D graphics for computers are Adobe Reader & Acrobat. To activate the interactive mode, click on the image. Once activated, one can click/drag to rotate the object and use the scroll wheel on a mouse to zoom in/out. (A great way to investigate an image is to first zoom in on the page of the pdf viewer so the graphic itself takes up much of the screen, then zoom inside the graphic itself.) A CTRL-click/drag pans the object left/right or up/down. By right-clicking on the graph one can access a menu of other options, such as changing the lighting scheme or perspective. One can also revert the graph back to its default view. If you wish to deactivate the interactivity, one can right-click and choose the “Disable Content” option.
The situation is more interesting for tablets and smartphones. The 3D graphics files have been arrayed at https://sites.und.edu/timothy.prescott/apex/prc/. At the bottom of the page are links to Android and iOS apps that can display the interactive files.