Lec 1: Introduction and mathematical preliminaries

MATH 147 Section 2, Fall Term 2022

I What is calculus all about?

I Course organization and materials
I Sets
I Functions

Key references: Text book sec 1.1

Why are we here?
What is calculus? Who invented it and why?
Newton

It is often stated that calculus was invented by Newton. It is now widely accepted that Isaac Newton and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently developed the basic ideas of calculus in the 17th century (many
foundational ideas were around long before that and many significant changes came after them).

Newton is famous for many discoveries and contributions to physics and mathematics. For example:
Newton’s laws

~ = m~a.
Newton’s second law of motion is commonly expressed as: F

What is acceleration, ~a? It can be defined as the instantaneous rate of change of velocity with time. Similarly,
velocity is the instantaneous rate of change of position with time. What can we do with this
information?

Calculus was developed as a tool to systematically approach problems like this. By formally relating accelerations
and velocities to positions, you could solve for the position of an object under the action of some force.

Newton’s law of universal gravitation states that between any two “point” masses, there is an attractive force
that acts along the line through them with magnitude

Gm1 m2
F = .
r2

What are “point” masses? They don’t exist!

But, Newton was presumably concerned with things that do exist (like planets). Actually, Newton did not
originally use the terminology of “points” and formulated the Law in terms of the distance between centres of
objects (even real objects have “centres”).
Idea of calculus

Perhaps, even if an object (such as the sun or a planet) is large, it can still be treated as a point as long as the
distance r to another object is much larger than the sizes of the two objects. Is this the same as considering all
of the mass concentrated at centres of objects?

The “calculus approach” would be to break down the object into many point-like pieces, use Newton’s formula
on each piece, and add up all of these small force contributions to get the total force.

What I’ve just described is integration, which will be the subject of Calculus 2 and 3. Calculus 1 focuses on
differentiation, which is closely related but opposite to integration in some sense; we are concerned with rates of
change. For example, how much will my weight (gravitational force) change if I eat one more bite of
cake?

In both differentiation and integration, it will be important to have a sensible and mathematically rigorous
notion of limits.
Course organization

I If you are in Section 2 (LEC 002, this section), you should also be enrolled in the term test (TST 201) and
Tutorial 102.

I Section 1 is run differently - please do not attend their tutorials as a substitute.

I See LEARN for course information and announcements throughout the term.

I Use Piazza for asynchronous discussion. The access code is UW MATH 147 002.

I A version of these lecture slides will be posted in LEARN before each lecture. Some details will be missing
so you should take notes during lectures.
Review of basic terminology and notation from set theory

A set is a collection of objects.

We typically use upper case letters, e.g., A to denote sets and lower case letters, e.g., a, to denote members,
also called elements, of a set.

Examples: a ∈ A. b ∈
/ B (not an element).

Let A and B be two sets.

We say that A and B are equal and write A = B if they have exactly the same members.

A set A is a subset of a set B if:

The union A ∪ B is:

The intersection A ∩ B is:

We can extend this idea to unions/intersections of n sets, or even of an infinite collection of sets.

The set difference A \ B is:

The Cartesian product A × B is:

Some commonly encountered sets

1. The empty set ∅.

2. The natural numbers (positive integers) N.

3. The integers Z.

4. The rational numbers Q.

5. The real numbers R.

Functions - basic definitions

A function, also called a mapping, from a set A to a set B, is a fixed rule that assigns exactly one element of B
to each element of A. (It is permitted for two elements of A to be assigned the same element of B.)

We use the notation f : A → B for a function f that maps from A to B.

The set A is referred to as the domain of f and the set B is called the co-domain of f .

In this course, we will mostly talk about functions whose domain and co-domain are (subsets of) R.

The range of a function is the set of elements in the co-domain that get mapped to.

The graph of a function f : A → B is the set of ordered pairs (x, y ) with x ∈ A and y ∈ B such that f (x) = y .

Since calculus is about changes and we often want to describe things that change over time, we will frequently
encounter functions of time (a real number), such as the outdoor temperature T throughout the day, or the
position ~x of a thrown ball.

Question
Can you think of any functions relevant to daily life where the domain is (i) a set of natural numbers or (ii) not
a set of numbers?
Operations on functions

Suppose we have two functions f , g . We can define the sum, multiple, product, quotient, and composite
functions in a pointwise fashion, respectively:

(f + g )(x) = f (x) + g (x),

(αf )(x) = αf (x), for some constant α ∈ R,

(fg )(x) = f (x)g (x),
(f /g )(x) = f (x)/g (x),
(f ◦ g )(x) = f (g (x)).

Question
What conditions (e.g., on the domains of the functions) are necessary for the definitions to make sense? What
are the domains of the new (transformed) functions?
Commonly encountered classes of functions

We will assume familiarity with:

1. polynomials,

2. trigonometric functions,

3. exponential and logarithm functions,

as well as compositions and algebraic operations (e.g., square roots) involving those types of functions.