It’s Basic Calculus – and I helped!

When I was an undergrad at Notre Dame back in the late 90’s, I was lucky enough to have been selected for the Honors Program. It was pretty selective (I think about 40 students per year?) and one of the perks was that we got to take a few special, smaller classes. One of the ones that I loved was Calculus. This particular course was aimed at Arts majors (yes, really!) and the professor was actually writing the textbook for it. We worked from big spiral bound proofs we bought at the local copyshop. I remember a lot of Classical story problems, and all of us working together to try to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun using only Archimedes’ methods, things like that. I discovered today that not only did Professor Hahn publish the book – Learning Basic Calculus: From Archimedes to Newton to Its Role in Science – but he thanked my class for our help in testing it out. How neat is that?