Calculus and analytic geometry

What Hacker News says

1. leed25dAug 2023
   D.B. Thomas for Calculus and Analytic Geometry

   Later on, Tom Apostol for Real Analysis

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2. mrtonypinoJul 2021
   Eleven years after graduating I have rediscovered how enjoyable it is to flip through a high quality intro textbook on a topic about which you are curious.

   I’ll go first:

   Calculus and Analytic Geometry (1951) by George Thomas

   It’s readily available for < $10 and I find it’s style much more engaging than contemporary textbooks on the same topic.

   And a bonus one - when we had questions for the doctor when my wife was pregnant, I read the beginning of this and can say with reasonably certainty that I reduced the probably of some negative outcomes as a result:

   Callen's Ultrasonography in Obstetrics and Gynecology (Mary Norton, 2016)

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3. hasitsethOct 2019
   Calculus And Analytic Geometry by Ross L. Finney and George B. Thomas is a good introduction to basic calculus. I understand you want something covering everything in math. Courant is the best one and others have written about it a lot.
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4. pen2lOct 2022
   Knuth is the poster child for the school of thought that just doing a _lot_ of math problems, especially calculus, is great mental weightlifting and we should make our young students do a lot of math homework. See this interview: https://ia600803.us.archive.org/29/items/conversation-with-k...

       I spent hours and hours studying the mathematics book we 
       used -- Calculus and Analytic geometry by Thomas.
       We were assigned only the even-numbered problems, but I 
       did every single one together with the extras in the back 
       of the book because I felt so scared. I thought I should 
       do all of them. I found at first that it was very slow 
       going, and I worked late at night to do it. I think the 
       only reason I did this was because I was worried about 
       passing. But then I found out that after a few months I 
       could do all of the problems in the same amount of time 
       that it took the other kids to do just the odd-numbered 
       ones. I had learned enough about problem solving by that 
       time that I could gain speed, so it turned out to be very 
       lucky that I crashed into it real hard at the beginning.
   

   It's important to get down a lot of hours solving problems for the express purpose of improving your mental faculties, improving working memory. So for the finite amount of time you have, what problems do you choose to work on? I think maths and calculus is a great bet. Though I'd rather suggest a young person do Spivak's Calculus as opposed to Thomas' Calculus as Knuth used. You'll notice that most of geniuses we know were spending long periods of time solving problems. I'm kind of scared that we will have less people like Knuth in our people, people who can just go and deepthink and solve _difficult_ problems. If we keep up with this meme of 'no homework' we are in danger.
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