Self-study manual for Calculus and analytical geometry by George B. Thomas, Jr. and Ross L. Finney, sixth edition

by Ross L. Finney and George B. Thomas Jr.

Book Overview

a great self-study manual for Calculus and analytic Geometry This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201162946
• ISBN13: 9782245019207
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Length: 393 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

This is the best

I recall seeing this book in my living room when I was seven or eight. I'd pull it off the shelf, open to chapter one, look at the word "limit" and feel my mind go blank. Well, six years later, I took AP Calculus AB and I made a five on the test. Many factors went in to that. This is one of them. This book feels very comfortable to read. The margins are very wide and there is a good space between the examples and the text. Professors Finney and Thomas wrote so clearly. Precise and concise. Whenever I didn't understand what was going on in my AP class, this helped to clarify it better. There are ample problems for you to practice and apply what you've learned. It's a shame that this isn't really sold anymore. This is the best. If you can get a copy of this, keep it. So good.

A manditory read for Science Majors

Use this book along with CDs on intermediate algebra Calc I and Calc II from www.thinkwell.com. as an excellent way to start your college studies. I especially liked the depth he went into with conic sections. I for one had not had that much prior use for conic sections. Newton did. He invented calculus in order to answer specific questions and that involved conics. I like that the writer goes beyond using some of Newtons conclusions and goes into more depth. If you dont like depth, then you can read the first first half of the book and stop there (as is done by most nonscience majors). I have seen other calculus books and specifically bought this once because I dont like just memorizing formulas. I wanted to know more about why this subject was invented in the first place.The amaising thing is that if you get through this book, you will be able to understand some math and physics known a few generations ago only to Newton and Libenez. Dont you feel smarter already? Even if you have read other calculus books, read this one!

A fine Calculus Textbook

This is perhaps one of the finest high-school Calculus textbooks in existance. The first eight chapters of Thomas-Finney deal with calculus of functions of a single variable, going through what is commonly known as BC calculus. In addition to covering the essential topics of differentiation and integration, Thomas-Finney pays ample attention to the applications of the two. What results is a lucid text full of examples that ground calculus in the real world.The second half of Thomas-Finney is devoted mainly to three-dimensional analytic geometry, multivariate calculus, and finally vector calculus. Partial derivitives, conic sections, vector-valued functions, and multiple integrals are just some of the topics covered in the second half. Here too, the book devotes ample time to examples and applications. The presentation of advanced concepts is top-notch.The text is also interspersed with mathematical biography and sidebars that explain how to use CAS to help understand concepts. These are well presented and do not take away from the core math taught in the book.I taught myself calculus during a summer using this book and without teacher intervention. It was the only one of five calculus textbooks that presented material clearly and simply enough to understand without outside help. In my mind, that's the highest compliment a math textbook can be given.

An outstanding calculus text

Thomas/Finney 9th edition covers all of the essential aspects of calculus, with an adequate amount of rigor as to not to confuse the freshman audience it is intended for. The graphs and diagrams are especially useful, and the book is extremely well-written. True, some of the examples in the exercises are a bit repetitive, and extremely simple. However, I used this text for an honors calculus class at Cornell, and when supplemented with the proper theoretical background to the subject (in lecture), the text is suitable for a course of that caliber. The "theory and examples" sections (where most of our problem sets came from) presented challenging questions which required a great deal of intuition. Overall the text is excellent, and I learned a lot from it. It has earned a place on my bookshelf.

The best

Thomas & Finney, from MIT, set the standard for Calculus texts with this book. It is a book by mathematicians for mathematicians, and is a must-have for anyone seriously devoted to the pursuit of math. As a student, I found it to be very helpful. Though it was not the text used by my class, I referred to it when the text failed or when I wanted to really understand how something worked.