Teaching myself Calculus

you have two options:

do you want to start at to VERY beginning and work to calculus?

do you want to learn about limits / derivatives / integrals (most of HS calc) intuitively and not formally?

if you answer yes to the first one, first understand logical connectives (implies, iff, and, or, not) and quantifiers (universal and existential) to begin being able to write logical sentences about math, and learn about fundamental analysis concepts from the ground up (sequences, convergence, Cauchy sequences, subsequences) then you can define things like limits and translate your proofs from sequences into limits, and work formally upwards that way.

or fuck that: if you just want to have some intuition on what a derivative / integral / limit of a particular function, then start over at kahn academy and learn like the rest of us do when we're bored. sift through unhelpful wikipedia pages. buy an old college level calc text book. start at limits, the derivatives, the integrals.

what I did in high school was I watched the MIT open courseware 18.01 videos taught by Professor Jerison. Those videos are pretty fucking great and easy to follow along to. I also had a cheap copy of Stewart Calculus which I bought used for like $5 at a half price books. I did a lot of exercises out of there after watching the corresponding MIT lesson, as if I were actually taking the class. It worked ok for me imo.

OP I taught myself Calculus using the free website "Paul's Online Math Notes".
It is by far the best resource I can think of for this. Simply read the lesson, take notes on it all into your notebook, and then do the practice problems.

Here: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

If you do that you will know calculus more than well enough to use in any other course that requires calculus.

Now if you REALLY want to understand calculus, you should read calculus textbooks. Not just ones that are designed for, say, engineers, which only cover the computations of calculus, but ones that teach you all the proofs and theory behind the math. These are important. This is what a mathematician would call "calculus."
For this, I recommend the book Calculus, Volumes 1 and 2 by Tom Apostol, as it is what I used, or Calculus on Manifolds by Michael Spivak, an absolute classic.

Now, if you really want to understand the foundations of calculus, then what you really want to study is analysis. Calculus is just the computation (caluculations) aspect of analysis, hence the name. An introduction to analysis, with some very basic topology and algebra as well, will teach you everything you could ever want to know about calculus and much more. Analysis is the field of math, and calculus is term that references the results and computational aspect of that field.

For analysis, I recommend reading Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis." This is a classic undergraduate text and the "bible" of basic analysis from which the field comes from. It is simple and but it must be read VERY SLOWLY. You have to actually sit there and think about every step of every proof and draw out why the proof is true and which connections were made. This book is difficult, but the good news is there is no prerequisite to learning it. You can know almost nothing about math and by simply forcing yourself to struggle through this book you will gain a foundation in analysis from which you can progress.

File: robot jox thumbs up.webm (1MB, 720x384px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 720x384px

>>7954112
>>7954087
>>7954068

>>7954087
I did the same. Highly recommended. Teaching yourself Calculus is completely possible.

>>7953815
patrickJMT on YouTube is great for self-teaching Calculus also. That same guy made the "Dummies 1,001 Calculus Problems Solved" book. Good for working on lots of problem sets as you go along.

khanacademy.org

>teaching myself
no you're not. you're learning through your resources.