>>12655278Calculus is about measuring rates of change in more sophisticated, quantitative (numerical) ways which you can't do with lower mathematics. Think about the speed of a car from moment-to-moment, or the area under a curve expressed in square units. These are crude (but naturally helpful) analogies. Arithmetic has four operations, and basic calculus adds two: differentiatoin (derivatives) and integraton (integrals). It turns out that the two operations complement each other, a bit like the (pairwise) arithmetic operations.
-The Pythagorean Theorem is really important. Make sure you know it cold and understand it in both the geometric and algebraic sense.
-Don't listen to this crank
>>12655283 at all. Seriously. He has falsely represented himself as having solved the Riemann Hypothesis, a famous unsolved math problem (he didn't). Cranks are pseudo-mathematicians, and he's one of them.
-Review and/or learn abuot trigonometry, the quadratic formula, exponential functions, and so on. Basically pre-calc topics.
-the idea of a function itself is also important.
-the algebraic symbol doesn't matter. It could be an x, or a squiggly line, as long as you define your terms. Learn the Greek alphabet for other commonly used traditional glyphs.
--
-The above are generally "pre-calculus" topics, the whole point of which is to give you the language with which to start doing calculus. Trig functions and exponential functions and polynomials etc are "elementary functions", a phrase which means that they're the simplest things to do calculus with. There are lots of nice math rules which give nice results using those FUNCTIONS. The functions are the objects of study.
-The single most amazing result to me when I first learned calculus was that . This curve, and the area that it bounds, you would think it might be some crazy irrational number like pi, but it isn't, it's precisely two. Calculus is full of nice tidy results like these.
