Mike May and Anneke Bart

Digital versions HTML and PDF
PreTeXt source Yes, available on GitHub
Exercises Yes
Answers to odd-numbered exercises Yes
Instructor materials Available on request
License
 
Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-Share Alike
  • One semester calculus course for business majors
  • Seven chapters, 477 pages
  • Spreadsheets, and Excel in particular, are the main computational tool
  • Examples and exercises follow the terminology and usage of the business world
  • Numerous exercises at the end of each section
  • Embedded videos in the HTML version
  • For more information and to download

This book is designed to support an authentic one-semester calculus for business students. Following recommendations of the MAA CRAFTY Curriculum Foundations Project, the text uses Excel as the primary computational tool and encourages students to develop good practices of spreadsheet use. Both differentiation and integration are introduced through numerical methods and partial differentiation is introduced before integration. The examples and definitions follow conventions of the business world, problems are frequently grounded in realistic data, and the exposition is focused on conceptual understanding rather than symbol manipulation. The book has been in use at Saint Louis University for five years and is used by at least three other institutions.

Contents:

  1. Functions, Graphs, and Excel
  2. Business Applications
  3. Rate of Change and Derivatives
  4. Symbolic Differentiation
  5. Differentiation Techniques and Applications
  6. Functions of Several Variables
  7. Integration