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Essence of Calculus
Chapter 1: New Thinking

“The art of doing mathematics is finding that special case that contains
all the germs of generality” -David Hilbert

Welcome to Essence of Calculus:

Hello everyone, welcome to your new alternative math curse. This is the first chapter in a
series on the essence of calculus and which I`ll be sharing with you the next couple months.
The goal here, as the name suggest, is to really get the heart of the subject out in one binge
readable set. But what does exactly mean that with a topic that`s as broad as calculus? Well
this is exactly what I have in mind. Calculus is usually referred as a bunch of lots of
formulas and rules which are often presented as things to be memorize.
∞
(𝒙 − 𝒂)𝒏
𝒇(𝒙) = ∑ 𝒇(𝒏) (𝒂)
𝒏!
𝒏=𝟎

Lots of derivate formulas, the product rule, the chain rule, implicit differentiation, the fact
that integrals and derivatives are opposite, Tylor series; just a lot of things like that. And
my goal is for you to think to yourself; if you were an early mathematician, pondering these
ideas and drawing the right diagrams, does it feel reasonable that you could have stumbled
across these truths yourself? I know, inventing math is no joke, and there is a difference
between being told why something is true and actually generating it from scratch. But at
all points I want you to come away feeling like you could have invented calculus yourself.
That is, cover all these core ideas, but in a way that makes clear where they actually come
from and what they really mean using an all-around visual approach.

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Let’s start:

In this introduction, I want to show how you might stumble into the core ideas of calculus
by thinking very deeply about one specific bit of geometry: the area of a circle. Maybe you
know that this is pi times its radius square, but why? Is there a nice way to think about
where this formula comes from?

𝐴 = 𝜋𝑅 2

Well of curse there is, and actually, leaving yourself open

to exploring the interesting thoughts that come about can
actually lead you to a glimpse of three big ideas in
calculus: integrals, derivatives and the fact they`re
opposites.

But the story starts more simply-just you and the circle; and for practical purposes let`s say
with radius three. And your goal is to figure out its area, you could go through a lot of paper
trying different ways to chop up and rearrange the pieces of that area, many of which might
lead to their own interesting observations.

But maybe you decide to divide de circle into many concentric rings. Why? Well, in this
way it respects the symmetry of the circle, which may seem promising because math has a
tendency to reward you if you respect its symmetries.

Okay, now we just need a manner to measure the area of each

one and then add them all up, and then we can figure out what the
area of our original circle is.

Going further now, we can stretch each one of these rings into a
strip and you could try thinking through exactly what this new
shape is and what its area should be, but for simplicity let´s just
approximate it as a rectangle.

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The area of these rectangles is given by its length, which is nothing else but the perimeter
of the circle we chop that is 2𝜋𝑟 right? I mean, this is the very definition of pi. But what
about its thickness? Well that depends on how finely you chopped the circle in the first
place, which is kind of arbitrary.

In spirit of using what will come to be standar calculus notation, let´s call that thicknes dr,
for a tyny difference in the radius from one ring to the next. Maybe you think of it as
something like 0.1. So approximating this unwrapped ring as a thin rectangle, its area is
2𝜋𝑟𝑑𝑟. And even though it is not perfect, fot smaller and smaller choises of dr, this is
actually going to be a better and better aproximation for that area.

Kepping all this in mind we move forward with this aproximation. So to sum up where we
are, you´ve brocken up the area of the circle into all these rings, and you are aproximating
the area of each one of those as two times pi, times its inner radius, times dr. Where the

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specific value of that inner radius ranges from 0, up to just below 3, spaced out by whatever
the thickness is that you choose for dr; something like 0.1.

Notice how the spacing here correspond to the thicknes from one ring to the next. In fact,
a nice way to think about the rectangles approximating each ring area, is to fit them all up-
right side by side along this axis. Each one has the same thickness dr, this is why they fit
so snugly together, and the height of any one of these rectangles corresponds to the specific
value of r, is exactly 2 pi times that value.

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A nice way to think about this set up us to draw the graph of 2𝜋𝑟 wich is a straigh line that
has a slope of 2 pi. Each of these rectangles extends up to the point where it just barely
touches that graph.

Again, we are just being aproximate here. Each of these rectangles only aproximates the
area of the corresponfing ring from the circle, but remember, this aproximation gets less
and less wrong as the size of dr gets smaller and smaller. And I know you may think that
that turns the problem into a mounstrusly large sum of very small rectangles.

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But look how all of their areas in aggregate just looks like the area under a graph. And that
portion under the graph is just a triangle. A triangle with a base 3 and a height that is 2
times pi times 3. So its area, ½ base times height, works out to be exactly pi times 3 square.

Or, if we want to generalize this expresion, as usually in math, to any radius our original
circle was, let´s say R. That area comes out to be 𝜋𝑅 2 , and that´s the formula for the area
of a circle!

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In summary:

So, we got our answer, but if you really want to think as a mathematician here, you don´t
just care finding the answer, you have to care about developing general problem-solving
tools and technics. Think about it, you have these problem, which can be approximate as
the sum of many small values. In this case we are referring to rings whose area is equivalent
to 2𝜋𝑟𝑑𝑟 and whose diameter ranges from 0 up to 3. Adding all these numbers can be seen
in a different and pretty clever way as adding the area of very thin rectangles sitting under
a graph. Remember that, first, dr is our choice of witness of the rings as well as the spacing
in between the different values of r and second, this is key, that these approximation to our
original problem, gets better for smaller choices of dr. So, in fact we can say that the sum
thought as the aggregate area of those thin rectangles approaches the area beneath the
graph. So, because of that you can conclude that the answer to the original question in full
un-approximated precision is exactly the same as the area underneath this graph.

Generalizing further:
Many hard problems in math and physics can be solves as a sum of many small values.
Things like, how far has a car travelled based in its velocity at each point of time, in which
case you may multiply its velocity at a certain time by a small change in time. Which will
give you to the corresponding little bit of distance travelled during that little time.

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Later, on this series I´m going to get into details by showing you more examples like this
but you just have to keep in mind that this kind of problems can be seen as the sum of many
thin rectangles underneath a graph, much the same way our circle problem did. Don´t worry
if this idea is not %100 clear right now, as I said earlier, this is something we´re going to
into more detail later. I just want you, as the mathematician who just solved the last problem
reframing it as the area beneath a graph, start thinking how to find the areas underneath
other graphs.

I know we were lucky that the last relevant area

turned to be a triangle, but imagine instead, finding
the area that is under a parabola. Can you find a
function A(x) that gives you the area under this
parabola given a certain value of x? A function A(x)
like this is called an “Integral” of x2. Calculus gives
you the tools for solving this equation but now we
don´t know what it is.

And why do we care about it? Again, is not just for the sake of asking hard geometry
questions, but because many practical problems can be reframed as the question of an area
beneath a graph. And I´ll tell you right now that finding this area, this integral function is
genuinely hard.

I would like to remember you that, whenever you find a genuinely hard problem in math,
is a good policy is not trying too hard to find the answer directly, but rather you can play

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around with the idea, with no particular goal in mind; spend some time building up
familiarity with the interplay between the function defining the graph and the function
giving the area.

In that playful spirit you may find that when you slightly increase x by a tiny nudge “dx”
there is a resulting change in area, that I´m going to call dA (difference in Area), and that
sliver can be very much represented as a rectangle whose height is x2 and whose width is
dx.

Following this thought, we can see in an interesting way how dA is related to x2 I mean,
this little change in area is more or less the original function multiplied by this little nudge
dx.

And this can be also represented as:

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In other words, we don´t know what A(x) is, but we do know a property it must have. By
example, consider a change in the input of A, something like the change between two near
by points like 3 and 3.001. Evaluate the difference between the values of our mysterious
function at 3.001 and 3, dived by the difference in our input values, which in this case is
0.001. And that should be equal to the value of x2 for the starting input, in this case 32.

And this relation between tiny changes in our mysterious function and the values of x2 is
not only true at x=3, it is true for at all inputs.

And even this does not exactly show us directly how to find the function of A, it provides
us a solid clue we can work with. And there is nothing special about the graph x2. Any
function referred as the area beneath a graph, has this property, that a slight nudge to the
output of A divided by the slight nudge that caused it, is about equal to the height of the
function at that point, and again this approximation gets better with smaller choices of dx.

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At this point we are now stumbling to another big idea of calculus: “Derivatives”. This
ratio dA divided by dx is called the derivative of A, or more property, the derivative of A
is whatever this ratio approaches as dx gets smaller and smaller.

Although, I´ll dive much deeply into the idea of the derivative in the next chapter, but
talking about it very loosely it refers about how sensitive a function is to small changes to
its input.

You’ll see as the series goes on, that there are a lot of ways of visualize a derivative,
depending on how you look at it and how you interpret the little nudges that come out of it

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The fundamental theorem of calculus:

And now why do we care so much about derivatives, well, because they help us to solve
problems, like in our little exploration here, we alredy have a slight glimpse of one way
they’re used. They are the key to solving integral questions, problems that require finding
the area under a curve. Once you get used to computing this derivatives, you can apply
reverse engineering to know from what function is the derivative funtion x2. And this back
and forth between integrals and derivatives where the derivative of a function for the area
under a graph gives you back the function defining the graph itself is called “The
Fundamental Theorem of Calculus”. It ties together the two big ideas of integrals, and
derivatives, and it shows, in some sense, how each one is an inverse of the other.

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Bibliography:

Elías, M. Á. (2018). Cálculo Diferencial NME. Aguascalientes: CBTis #168.

Héctor Castañeda Infante, M. Á. (2018). Cálculo Integral. Aguascalientes: CBTis #168.
Sanderson, G. (2017, Abril 28). Essence of calculus. Stanford, California, E.U.A.
Retrieved 12 29, 2019, from
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