The Cartoon Guide to Calculus

“How do you humanize calculus and bring its equations and concepts to life? Larry Gonick’s clever and delightful answer is to have characters talking, commenting, and joking-all while rigorously teaching equations and concepts and indicating calculus’s utility. It’s a remarkable accomplishment-and a lot of fun.” – Lisa Randall, Professor of Physics, Harvard University, and author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door Gonick is to graphical expositions of advanced materials as Newton or Leibniz is to calculus. The difference is that Gonick has no rival. – Xiao-Li Meng, Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics and Department Chair, Harvard University Larry Gonick’s sparkling and inventive drawings make a vivid picture out of every one of the hundreds of formulas that underlie Calculus. Even the jokers in the back row will ace the course with this book. – David Mumford, Professor emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Brown University and recipient of the National Medal of Science I always thought that there are no magic tricks that use calculus. Larry Gonick proves me wrong. His book is correct, clear and interesting. It is filled with magical insights into this most beautiful subject. – Persi Diaconis, Professor of Mathematics, Stanford It has no mean derivative results about the only derivatives that matter… A spunky tool-toting heroine called Delta Wye seems the perfect role model for our next generation. – Susan Holmes, Professor of Statistics, Stanford A creative take on an old, and for many, tough subject…Gonick’s cartoons and intelligent humor make it a fun read. – Amy Langville, Recipient of the Distinguished Researcher Award at College of Charleston and South Carolina Faculty of the Year

Larry Gonick has been creating comics that explain history, science, and other big subjects for more than forty years. He wrote his first guide, Blood from a Stone: A Cartoon Guide to Tax Reform, in 1977. He has been a calculus instructor at Harvard (where he earned his BA and MA in mathematics) and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and he is staff cartoonist for Muse magazine.