Math 111 Descriptions
F01 MTuWF 12:00-12:50 (Jerry Shurman)
This section of Math 111 meets four days a week. It is meant for
students who have already taken an AP/IB style calculus course and
want to see a variant approach to the subject, but it should also
serve students who found high school algebra fluid and comfortable,
and who are motivated to engage with calculus in part through analytic
arguments--i.e., arguments that use symbols substantively. The
earliest example of integration is Archimedes' quadrature of the
parabola, and so we will begin there. After that, we will introduce
the rational power function, the logarithm function, the exponential
function, and basic trigonometric functions, taking care with their
definitions and making explicit how these functions rely on
fundamental properties of the calculus number system. We will
integrate each of these functions without using the Fundamental
Theorem of Calculus; computing each integral reduces to computing a
related normalized derivative value, showing that the Fundamental Theorem
genuinely occurs in practice. Also we will differentiate each of
these functions. Toward the end of the semester we will cover some
standard topics: optimization and related rates problems, basic
methods of antidifferentiation, and possibly the Taylor series of
the functions mentioned above. Because these topics will come at
the end, students who aren't conversant with AP/IB calculus and
take this course concurrently with Reed's introductory physics may
need to do some separate reading for the calculus being used in
that course. To preview the notes for this section of Math 111, see
http://people.reed.edu/~jerry/
To discuss with the instructor whether this section might be a good choice for
you, email Jerry Shurman at jerry@reed.edu.