On 13/12/2014 02:50, Bernie Cosell wrote:
A very smart friend has the misfortune of being an English major and so avoided essentially all math courses in college [many many years ago]. Any recommendations on a good "intro" book [I'd be helping as mentor/tutor]. A check on Amazon uncovers dozens of "Calculus made easy" and such books... I suppose I could just pick one at random...
Not an answer to the question, but the following story may amuse some readers. When I was an undergraduate, one of my friends was an English major, and one day he came to me and asked me to explain integration to him. So I started talking about limits of sums, areas under curves, and all that. "No, no," he said. "That can't be right." Why not? Well, you see, the reason he'd asked me the question was that he had been reading something by Barthes or one of these other highfalutin' French literary theorists, and it made some comment that such-and-such was a matter of "integration, in the mathematical sense". And such-and-such obviously had nothing whatever to do with what I was trying to explain... (Aha, found it. http://eng5010.pbworks.com/f/Barthes.pdf. "[Criticism's] role is solely to elaborate a language whose coherence, logic, in short whose systematics can collect or better still can “integrate” (in the mathematical sense of the word) the greatest possible quantity of Proustian language, exactly as a logical equation tests the validity of reasoning without taking sides as to the “truth” of the arguments it mobilizes." It's too bad they never told me about Proustian language in my introductory analysis courses.) -- g