Calculus is not for Mathematicians
I’m going to respond to Michael Xue here because, as is all too common, the comment form simply isn’t working.
Spoken like a true mathematician. Harvard Reform might indeed have left a generation of students less prepared for advanced mathematics than ever before, but it’s not as if there’s any shortage of advanced mathematicians today, and more importantly it’s not like future mathematicians were then or now the primary audience for calculus classes. I’d estimate that well more than 90% of students who actually use calculus do so in physics, engineering, economics, and other scientific fields. Mathematics for mathematics’s sake was always a small minority. I learned calculus the old way, but I never understood it until I taught it the new way.
Newton, Leibniz, Euler, and Gauss didn’t need epsilon delta proofs. Neither do students of calculus, with the sole exception of the small minority who are trying to become pure mathematicians, and they can pick it up in their first real analysis course.
