Open Educational Resources: Math and Statistics

Rather than detailed explanations and worked out examples, this book uses activities intended to be done by the students in order to present the standard concepts and computational techniques of calculus. The student activities provide most of the material to be assigned as homework, but since the book does not contain the usual routine exercises, instructors wanting such exercises will need to supply their own or use a homework system such as WebWork. With this approach Active Calculus makes it possible to teach an inquiry based learning course without severely restricting the material covered. The book has now been used for several years at Grand Valley State (the authors’ institution) and other colleges and universities.

This is a text for the standard three-semester course in single and multivariable calculus for science and engineering students, recently split to also accommodate schools on the quarter system. The authors are part of the APEX (Affordable Print and Electronic Textbooks) consortium based at VMI, which is developing other open textbooks as well. This text has been adopted for all sections of calculus at VMI and at a number of other schools across the U.S. The visual presentation is clear and pleasing, and the organization and style are reminiscent of the best known commercial textbooks and is now in version 4.0.

An openly licensed applied calculus textbook, covering derivatives, integrals, and an intro to multivariable calculus. This book is heavily remixed from Dale Hoffman's Contemporary Calculus textbook, and retains the same conceptual focus from that text.

Originally published in 1980 by Benjamin/Cummings, the current edition was published by Springer-Verlag in 1985 and is still in print. The publisher makes the PDF versions freely available and allows individuals to print single copies for their own use.

This textbook, originally published by W. H. Freeman in 1995, is the result of the Five College Calculus Project, a multi-year project funded by the NSF beginning in 1986. The unifying concept of a dynamical system is used throughout to develop calculus in the broader context of scientific questions. “Therefore, differential equations belong at the center of calculus, and technology makes this possible at the introductory level.” The text is aimed at a broad audience as the authors believe “that calculus is one of the great bonds that unifies science. All students should have an opportunity to see how the language and tools of calculus help forge that bond.” (Quotes are from the overview on the book’s home page, which gives an excellent picture of the nature of this unusual book.)

The book covers the standard material in a calculus course for science and engineering. The size of the book is such that an instructor does not have to skip sections in order to fit the material into the typical course schedule. The single variable material is contained in eleven chapters beginning with analytic geometry and ending with sequences and series. The multivariable material consists of five chapters and includes with the vector calculus of in two and three dimensions through the divergence theorem. The book ends with a final chapter on differential equations.

Many of these materials were developed for the Open Course Library Project of the Washington State Colleges as part of a Gates Foundation grant. The goal of this project was to create materials that would be FREE (on the web) to anyone who wanted to use or modify them (and not have to pay $200 for a calculus book). They have been used by several thousand students.

The book covers all the material of single and multivariable calculus that is normally in a three semester course for science, mathematics, and engineering students. The style is less formal and more personal than the typical text, and it has a definite point of view that helps keep the book to a reasonable length. Still, there are some non-traditional topics such as a bit of linear algebra in two and three dimensions in the chapter on vectors and a section on complex numbers in the chapter on polar coordinates.

This is a textbook for mainstream calculus typically taught over three semesters. The production qualities are high and the books look like commercially published books. There are overlapping chapters in each volume to provide some flexibility in scheduling and to minimize the chance that more than one volume will be required for each semester. The student guide consists of a separate Word document for each section. Each section has “Checkpoint Problems” within the text and answers to these at the end of each volume.

The book has the material typically covered in the third semester of a mainstream calculus course for science, mathematics, and engineering students.

Created by West Texas A&M University, the Virtual Math Lab provides tutorials for College Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, Beginning Algebra, and Math for the Sciences.

"S.O.S. MATHematics is your free resource for math review material from Algebra to Differential Equations! The perfect study site for high school, college students and adult learners."

books published in the 19th or early 20th century