A brief introduction to Calculus

In nearly every level of school, students will always complain about math. "Why do we
have to learn it?" How will this help us?" "This is hard." While this complaining may persist,
math does have a purpose. It is an essential way to build insight and logic, and to date, it is the
only way to build it in a classroom. With the right foundation, any subject can be taught to any
student, and that foundation is what I hope to achieve in this paper. I hope to teach a good
portion of calculus by the time you are done reading this paper.
The reason I am doing this is because I love math and logic. It is a way to build the mind
in a way nothing else can. You can see things from different angles with math, and understand
there is more than one way to solve any problem. I hope you learn from this and enjoy it.
What is a limit? A limit is a value on the XY Plane. It is expressed in this complicated
looking manner:
( ( ))
This looks pretty annoying, but it is actually pretty simple. As I said, a limit is just a value. f(x) is
just a function, and a is just the x value. In many cases, you can plug in a for x and get the value.
Take the following examples:
(

In the first example, we have the function f(x)=x+4. If we plug in 4, we get 8. In the second, we
plug in 2 and get 4. It is as simple as that. However, it does get a little harder from here. There
are situations where the limit cannot be found by just plugging in or where there are limits that
do not exist or. Take the following examples:
(

For a limit to exist, on a graph, the line must come from both directions and meet at a point. So
let's look at the examples on graphs.
As we can see, it is a line, but
the value for x=1 does not have
a value. However, since the line
comes to the value of 0 from
both sides, the limit equals 0.

In this example, at x=3, there is no

value, and from the left, the y value
goes down to - while from the left
the y value goes up to . So, in this
case, the limit does not exist.

Now that we have covered limits, we can move on to the next part. For this next part, we
will primarily use the function ( )
. Let's take the graph of this function:
For this graph, we will find the average slope from between two points,
4 times. The formula for average slope is commonly described as rise
over run, or

where is the y value of the second point, is the y value of the first
point, is the x value of the second point, and is the x value of the
first point. Let's further explain this with a few examples.
For this example, we will find the average slope from x=1 to x=4. Using the
previous equation, and because
we will get

For this example, we will find the average slope from x=1 to x=3. Using the
previous equation, and because
we will get

For this example, we will find the average slope from x=1 to x=2. Using the
previous equation, and because
we will get

For this example, we will find the average slope from x=1 to x=1.5. Using the
previous equation, and because
we will get

In these examples, we have seen that these numbers get closer and closer to 2, while we tried to
find the average slope between 1 and 4, 3, 2, and 1.5. And that the shorter this line gets, the
closer to 2 the average slope gets. But what if we didn't want to find the average slope between
two points? What if we wanted to find the slope of one point? Now that we have concluded that,
let's mess with this line a little bit by rewriting the formula
.

If we call the difference between two x-values on this graph 'h,' then x2 becomes x+h and y2
becomes f(x+h). Now, we can rewrite the following formula as:

( )

And by canceling the x's in the denominator, we get:

(

( )

where x is the first x value, and h is the length from the first x value to the second x value and S equals
the average slope. So back to the question, what if we wanted to find the slope of one point? What if

we wanted to know the slope of the curve at the point x=1. Rephrase, what if we wanted to know
the slope of this black line:

By what we have learned so far, we would have to use the equation

( )

. But, this

time, 'h' cannot be 4, 3, 2, or 1.5. It needs to be smaller. Much smaller. 'h' would have to be 0, or, as close
as it gets, which is how we arrive to the this equation to find the slope of any point on a graph, otherwise
known as the Derivative.

( )