“Calculus Reordered” tells the remarkable story of how calculus grew over centuries into the subject we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to 17-century figures Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, how it was shaped by Italian philosophers such as Galileo Galilei, and how its current structure sprang from developments in the 19th century. Bressoud reveals problems with the standard ordering of its curriculum—limits, differentiation, integration, and series—and he argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical evolution of calculus represents a sounder way for students to learn this fascinating area of mathematics.
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What We Are Reading Today: Calculus Reordered by David Bressoud
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What We Are Reading Today: Calculus Reordered by David Bressoud
What We Are Reading Today: Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson
In “Three Roads Back,” Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, tells the connected stories of how these foundational American writers and thinkers dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers.
For Emerson, it was the death of his young wife and, 11 years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, it was the death of his brother; and for James, it was the death of his beloved cousin Minnie Temple.
Filled with rich biographical detail and unforgettable passages from the journals and letters of Emerson, Thoreau, and James, these vivid and moving stories of loss and hard-fought resilience show how the writers’ responses to these deaths helped spur them on to their greatest work, influencing the birth and course of American literature and philosophy.
As Richardson shows, all three emerged from their grief with a new way of seeing, one shaped by a belief in what Emerson called “the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.”
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