Calculus is one of the grandest achievements of human thought, explaining everything from planetary orbits to the optimal size of a city to the periodicity of a heartbeat. This brisk course covers the core ideas of single-variable Calculus with emphases on conceptual understanding and applications. The course is ideal for students beginning in the engineering, physical, and social sciences. Distinguishing features of the course include: 1) the introduction and use of Taylor series and approximations from the beginning; 2) a novel synthesis of discrete and continuous forms of Calculus; 3) an emphasis on the conceptual over the computational; and 4) a clear, dynamic, unified approach.
Offered By
Calculus: Single Variable Part 1 - Functions
University of PennsylvaniaAbout this Course
Skills you will gain
- Series Expansions
- Calculus
- Series Expansion
Offered by

University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (commonly referred to as Penn) is a private university, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. A member of the Ivy League, Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and considers itself to be the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Introduction
Welcome to Calculus: Single Variable! below you will find the course's diagnostic exam. if you like, please take the exam. you don't need to score a minimal amount on the diagnostic in order to take the course. but if you do get a low score, you might want to readjust your expectations: this is a very hard class...
A Review of Functions
This module will review the basics of your (pre-)calculus background and set the stage for the rest of the course by considering the question: just what <i>is</i> the exponential function?
Taylor Series
This module gets at the heart of the entire course: the Taylor series, which provides an approximation to a function as a series, or "long polynomial". You will learn what a Taylor series is and how to compute it. Don't worry! The notation may be unfamiliar, but it's all just working with polynomials....
Limits and Asymptotics
A Taylor series may or may not converge, depending on its limiting (or "asymptotic") properties. Indeed, Taylor series are a perfect tool for understanding limits, both large and small, making sense of such methods as that of l'Hopital. To solidify these newfound skills, we introduce the language of "big-O" as a means of bounding the size of asymptotic terms. This language will be put to use in future Chapters on Calculus.
Reviews
- 5 stars80.16%
- 4 stars15.45%
- 3 stars2.27%
- 2 stars0.70%
- 1 star1.40%
TOP REVIEWS FROM CALCULUS: SINGLE VARIABLE PART 1 - FUNCTIONS
Awesome , I love to do maths ( challenging maths ) like we are playing game and clearing level one by one ,but still it will be better if we get answer of question which we failed to attempt it
Very well structured for a refresher course. Thank you Professor Ghrist for your effort in putting this course together. A little additional outside research was required but well worth the effort.
Very insightful. However, I believe (although I may be wrong) that certain methods and techniques required to solve the homework problems weren't explained in the course material.
The course is intriguing. More practice questions and explanations will be good. And it will be beneficial if it can provide extra background knowledge (or link) for further study.
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