About This Textbook
In Active Calculus: Multivariable, students are actively engaged in learning the subject through an activity-driven approach in which the vast majority of the examples are generated by students. Where many texts present a general theory followed by substantial collections of worked examples, this text instead poses problems or situations, considers possibilities, and then asks students to investigate and explore. Following key activities or examples, the presentation normally includes some overall perspective and a brief synopsis of general trends or properties, followed by formal statements of rules or theorems. While the text often offers plausibility arguments for such results, rarely does it include formal proofs. It is not the intent of this text for the instructor or author to demonstrate to students that the ideas of calculus are coherent and true, but rather for students to encounter these ideas in a supportive, leading manner that enables them to begin to understand calculus for themselves.
Active Calculus: Multivariable is a continuation of Active Calculus: Single Variable. This text is designed to support an active learning approach in the third semester of calculus, including more than 100 activities and 300 exercises. In the HTML version, more than 200 of the exercises are available as anonymous interactive WeBWorK exercises. There are also 3D full-color graphics in much of the text, including interactive Sage cells.
This text may be used as a stand-alone textbook for a standard multivariable calculus course or as a supplement to a more traditional text. Chapter 9 introduces functions of several independent variables along with tools that will be used to study these functions, namely vectors and vector-valued functions. Chapter 10 studies differentiation of functions of several independent variables in detail, addressing the typical topics including limits, partial derivatives, and optimization, while Chapter 11 provides the standard topics of integration of multivariable functions. Note that Chapter 12 is present in the web version of the book, but not in the PDF.
Instructors may visit the instructors page linked in the ancillary materials to learn more about available supporting materials and join the Google Group for instructors.
Author
Steven Schlicker, David Austin, Matthew Boelkins
Publisher
Grand Valley State University
Publish Date
December 28, 2019
Edition
2018 Edition
Language
English
Level
Undergraduate
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Supplementary Materials
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