Calculus Center's blog

One of the easiest and most important formulas in Mathematics is the formula for arc length. This simple formula has a lot of applications that we want to talk about in the future, but for now we want to explain what it is and how to calculate it.

If someone came up to you and said they had "four", what would your reaction be? For most people the response would be: "Four what?" The what is called a unit or dimension and lets us know what a number means. The person talking could be referring to four inches, four feet, four dollars, four apples, and the list goes on. So if someone said they had four oranges the unit would be oranges.

Have you ever wondered what it means to have something increase exponentially? When someone says this they usually mean really fast or really big. We want to tell you what this means and to show you in pictures why something that increases exponentially increases a lot and very quickly.

Even if you never expect or need to take a course in Calculus, having a strong liberal education should include understanding some of the most basic concepts in science. The cornerstone of today's high tech, big data world is Calculus. It is the language and foundation of modern statistics, engineering, physics, chemistry, medicine, quantitative finance, and the list goes on. So if you have always felt that this subject was complicated then this article is here to answering in the simplest terms: What is Calculus?

We recently came upon an online discussion that asked what $12/2/3/2$ was. Several people remarked that it was $1$ and others remarked that it was $9$. In typical internet fashion the venom came out and one individual who believed it was $9$ become more and more insulting to those who thought it was $1$. So what is the correct answer?