Sample pages from The Manga Guide to Calculus (Source: No Starch Press)
As many people struggle with math, publishers have created neat ways to help teach the sometimes tough subject
I have never been a stellar math student, which has made learning it extremely difficult throughout high school and college. I've been able to learn the math I needed to, but it was a painful, less than enjoyable experience that surprisingly didn't give me nightmares.
I recently picked up a copy of "The Manga Guide to Calculus," an interesting book that combines a Japanese comic book story with some of the fundamentals of calculus. The book starts off as a regular manga story about Noriko, a news reporter for the Asagake Times, who wants to cover the hard-hitting stories.
Under the watchful eye of Editor Mr. Seki, Noriko learns how to cover various topics using real-world application of calculus. From there, Seki teaches Noriko how to learn math using examples that can be applied to the real world: probability, economics of pollution, supply and demand curves, and the density of Japanese liquor.
Simply staring at a page of math formulas never taught me anything, and it tends to be a common problem among people who do poorly in math. The book uses real-world examples of how calculus and other math is used every day, offering examples that are easy to understand.
Topics range from functions and rules of differentiation, integrating functions, integration techniques, multivariable functions, and other similar Calculus-related topics. The book covers quite a bit of material, so the author, Hiroyuki Kojima, is unable to go into depth regarding each topic.
The end of each chapter includes practice problems -- not many of them, of course -- with all answers provided at the end of the book.
This book does exactly what it is supposed to off: offer a fun, interesting to learn calculus concepts that would otherwise be extremely bland to memorize. I was able to read through the book and relearn many of the topics that I either knew and forgot, or struggled with previously. The "Manga Guide to Calculus" obviously isn't meant as a tool to replace text books, but is an absolutely amazing extra learning tool for math students.
The "Manga Guide to Calculus" is available from No Starch Press for $19.95.
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