Why do many college students majoring in engineering or science— perhaps you—find mathematics courses difficult? For the past seventy
years, the math requirement for these majors has been two or three calculus courses followed by a differential equations course. The basic ideas of calculus are not complex, but solving calculus problems often requires the application of pre-calculus topics such as algebra,
trigonometry, and geometry. You would have been introduced to these topics in high school but would benefit from a fresh, college-level approach. Other college-level math courses in linear algebra, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, and number theory, if taken at all, are taken later in the curriculum, often as apparent add-on courses.
This book takes a new approach to a first-year mathematics course by
showing you how to use Excel to discover the fundamentals of many
areas of mathematics, including geometry, trigonometry, probability,
logic, algorithms, algebra, vectors, calculus, and differential equations.
In Chapter 1, you will learn why the transcendental numbers π and e
have the values they do and what the imaginary number i = √−1 means.
Also, by the end of Chapter 1, you will be able to use Excel to find
the derivative and the integral of any one-dimensional function. Later
chapters will explore these topics in more detail. By the end of this
book, you will be a skilled user of Excel and can use it in future courses
to discover much more.
You will meet many accomplished mathematicians of the past and
learn how they struggled as hard as you do to understand different
areas of mathematics. However, you have a significant advantage over
the great past mathematicians. While they struggled with only paper
and pencils, you can benefit from computers, particularly spreadsheet
programs like Excel.
We will work through many Excel examples. We will tell you how to
do these examples yourself, but if each Excel step isn’t clear, we have
provided a short video on implementing each example. You can find
all these videos at http://www.lbebooks.com/discovermath/.
So, what is mathematics? You’ll start discovering that in Chapter 1.
Richard E. Haskell
Darrin M. Hanna
