Calculus: Early Transcendentals (2nd Edition)

Book Preface

The second edition of Calculus: Early Transcendentals supports a three-semester or fourquarter calculus sequence typically taken by students studying mathematics, engineering, the natural sciences, or economics. The second edition has the same goals as the first edition:

• to motivate the essential ideas of calculus with a lively narrative, demonstrating the utility of calculus with applications in diverse fields;
• to introduce new topics through concrete examples, applications, and analogies, appealing to students’ intuition and geometric instincts to make calculus natural and believable; and
• once this intuitive foundation is established, to present generalizations and abstractions and to treat theoretical matters in a rigorous way.

The second edition both builds on the success and addresses the inevitable deficiencies of the first edition. We have listened to and learned from the instructors who used the first edition. They have given us wise guidance about how to make the second edition an even more effective learning tool for students and a more powerful resource for instructors. Users of the book continue to tell us that it mirrors the course they teach—and more importantly, that students actually read it! Of course, the second edition also benefits from our own experiences using the book, as well as our experiences teaching mathematics at diverse institutions over the past 30 years.

We are grateful to users of the first edition—for their courage in adopting a first edition book, for their enthusiastic response to the book, and for their invaluable advice and feedback. They deserve much of the credit for the improvements that we have made in the second edition.