A. A. Klaf

How long has it been since your last Calculus class? Mine was several years ago now, and I never did too well. Therefore, I assumed that a refresher would be the most appropriate thing for me. This book is called Calculus Refresher for Technical People and it was written by a man named A A Klaf. It was written in the 1940s, and the version I have is a reprint.

The book starts out slow with talking about what variables are. Eventually, by a method of questions and answers, it gets through one or two semesters of Calculus. The book is not intended to be your first introduction to Calculus. This is made clear in the preface. The author’s intent was that if you need to brush up on your skills, you could use this book as a quick refresher. While the book does go and discuss a lot of ideas in Calculus it does not dig too deep into each section.

Calculus Refresher for Technical People begins as most books on Calculus do with Derivatives and Differentiation. It takes this section all the way up to the Curvature of Curves and Partial Differentiation. The second section of the book covers Integration. The book contains the Integration Tables you need in the Integration Section. The third section talks about Differential Equations but doesn’t foray too far into it. The final section of the book is made up of two appendices and an index. The first appendix is a section that contains answers to the problems in the book. The second appendix contains Useful Formulas, Notations, and Tables. The book was written during a time when people had to use tables of known values and stuff like that. I don’t know if the Slide Rule was in vogue back in the 1940s since I am not really a math historian or anything.

The book is quite informative. The pacing and the format are quite snappy and it makes for a quick read unless you want to do any of the problems in the book.… (more)