Misteaks: And How to Find Them Before the Teacher Does

Mistakes, particularly absurd ones, form a staple of humor. Examples in video include anything starring the Three Stooges, the movies starring Inspector Cleauseau, the television show `Home Improvement', starring Tim Allen; and the antics of Gilligan on the television show "Gilligan's Island." This book uses some of the common errors made in calculus assignments as the basis for humor and you can recognize some of the techniques that are used in other forms of humor. Cipra also uses verbal play to create jokes. On page seven there is the paragraph and footnote Please don't get the idea that fudging always give the right answer. Sometimes it does, but usually it doesn't. In the example above, one fudge did and one fudge didn't. (Unfortunately, the one that didn't preceded the one that did, so; even the one that did really didn't.)* *I didn't understand that parenthetical remark either. (You can safely ignore all parenthetical remarks in this book.) The self-referential paradox in the footnote brought a smile to my face. There are "problems" at the end of each chapter, and they are also used to add to the giggle count. On page 8, there is the problem Discuss the positivity or negativity of the change in temperature of a bucket of water when the following items are dropped in it: a) An ice cube. b) A glowing coal. c) A used (or unused) calculus book. Embedded within the wordplay and other occasional jocularity are some calculus problems that are totally mucked up. Dropped signs, altered signs, and symbols are shifted around like berserk ping-pong balls, just like always seems to happen on calculus exams. Cipra covers the majority of the most common and offensive mistakes, making it worth your time if you are a calculus student. He spends a great deal of time in covering ways in which you can catch your mistakes, and that knowledge could save your skin. This is one of the rarest of all books, funny, yet with a lot of serious mathematical content. Mathematics is a field where a symbol is shorthand for a great deal of computation and you must take care to use the symbols correctly. By seeing how not to do it, you can arm yourself with the knowledge to do it right. Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

I wish I'd found this earlier in my introduction to calculus, which at first was a Grand Mystery only to be penetrated by Wise Math Geeks. While it's *not* a guarantee of perfect math grades (few things are), it does offer useful rules-of-thumb for checking your results in introductory (single-variable) calculus. I've found the estimation techniques useful on occasion in places like physics classes.It's also a fun read, if you're struggling with calc. :-p