PROFESSOR: Hi, I'm Gilbert
Strang, and I'm a math
professor at MIT.
And I hope these highlights of
calculus will be helpful.
I started the project this
year, because the linear
algebra lectures which were in
class have been watched by a
lot of people on
OpenCourseWare.
And so I looked at what there
was for calculus.
And I saw two or three
types of things.
One was lectures, sort of
very serious, too mathy.
And another was supported by
foundations, an effort to make
math look so terrifically
exciting and wonderful and
connect with everything.
And yet, I feel a lot of
people are taking math
courses, calculus, in high
school, in college, and simply
want a little help to see
what's the main point.
And maybe that's the idea of
these lectures, is to try to
tell you the main point without
all the heavy things
that a giant textbook would
do, and without all the
practice that you'll get
in class, and doing
exercises and so on.
So these are kind of short,
but I hope alive.
And if they help,
I'm very happy.
So I guess I'm hoping everybody
might watch this
who'd like a little help or a
second look at calculus, both
high school and college
students.
I wanted to capture key ideas
that you could use for review
and see new examples
and see just coming
from a second person.
That seems to be what succeeds
with linear algebra.
The videos are sort of just to
add, to supplement what you're
actually seeing in class
and in the textbook.
I think of the textbooks as
often so large and so many
exercises that it's totally easy
to lose the key point,
what's essential about calculus
and what is just kind
of routine and practice.
So in short videos, it has to
be the essential points, the
three groups of functions, like
powers of x, sine and
cosine of x, and e to the x.
If you understand those, you've
got the main ideas.
We're starting out with a first
group of five videos.
Maybe big picture is the words
that we think of for those.
And then that'll be the first
group that'll be on
OpenCourseWare.
And then I've done 12 after
that, that do sort of the rest
of differential calculus, big
words just meaning how to find
the derivative, the
slope, the speed.
You'll see in the videos.
And then after that could come
integral calculus, if you
think I should.
I don't think of a lot of
prerequisites for these videos.
I guess I'm always hopeful that
you could watch them even
if you haven't started calculus,
to see what's
coming, what it's about.
I've taught math for a long
time, and it's so easy to get
into the course and jump over
the opening, the introduction
that tells what's
important here.
And that's maybe what these
videos are aimed at.
FEMALE SPEAKER: This has been
a production of MIT
OpenCourseWare and
Gilbert Strang.
Funding for this video was
provided by the Lord
Foundation.
To help OCW continue to provide
free and open access
to MIT courses, please
make a donation at
ocw.mit.edu/donate.
