Epilogue and Apologue

Excerpts

• Epilogue and Apologue

  You don’t teach the rules of syntax to children until they have already become fluent in the *use* of speech. It would be equally absurd to require general rigid demonstrations to be expounded to beginners in the calculus.

• Epilogue and Apologue

  There are amongst young engineers a number on whose ears the adage that *what one fool can do, another can*, may fall with a familiar sound.

• Epilogue and Apologue

  You don’t forbid the use of a watch to every person who does not know how to make one? You don’t object to the musician playing on a violin that he has not himself constructed. You don’t teach the rules of syntax to children until they have already become fluent in the *use* of speech. It would be equally absurd to require general rigid demonstrations to be expounded to beginners in the calculus.

• Epilogue and Apologue

  Any subject can be made repulsive by presenting it bristling with difficulties.

• Epilogue and Apologue

  The aim of this book is to enable beginners to learn its language, to acquire familiarity with its endearing simplicities, and to grasp its powerful methods of solving problems, without being compelled to toil through the intricate out-of-the-way (and mostly irrelevant) mathematical gymnastics so dear to the unpractical mathematician.

• Epilogue and Apologue

  By showing you that *what one fool can do, other fools can do also*, it lets you see that these mathematical swells, who pride themselves on having mastered such an awfully difficult subject as the calculus, have no such great reason to be puffed up.

• Epilogue and Apologue

  First, it shows how ridiculously easy most of the operations of the calculus really are.

• Epilogue and Apologue

  They are earnestly requested not to give the author away, nor to tell the mathematicians what a fool he really is.

Equations

Problems

No exercises in this chapter.