I have an old calculus book. The delightfully sexist title "A Calculus Refresher for Technical Men" -- it's a cold war era relic. A crash course designed to impart the machinery, if not the entire context and meaning of calculus in such a way that you could solve equations, determine trajectories, understand cooling rates, as quickly as possible. It's a part of a vast machine of educational technologies developed to prepare men to use math as a tool in warfare. 1/
Like an old religious text it's written entirely in the form of questions and answers. Because to learn this material is not to synthesize new ideas but rather to correctly give the expected responses for each question.
And it's possible, that with a curious mind, (like the one that my father was gifted with you might ultimately gain some insight into the mathematics behind those questions and answers through a kind of bulk familiarity with the subject, but this was never the intent. 2/
@134318c2 The thing is, they took away a lot of those practical examples in modern mathematics courses - which is why you get so much "what is this good for?" these days. Nothing does for the dx/dt velocity stack like ballistics.
@134318c2 It looks like there's an edition from 1944, so WW2 recycled for the post-Sputnik generation?
@134318c2 My school math teacher -- and RAF navigator -- told me that Britain lost most of its mathematicians in the air over Germany, and basically it wasn't until the 1970s that there was enough expertise in *teachers* for high school students to learn math as they did before the war.
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