Category: Humor

Schoolhouse Rock and Calculus

After presenting the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus to my calculus students, I make a point of doing the following example in class:

\displaystyle \int_0^4 \frac{1}{4} x^2 \, dx

Hopefully my students are able to produce the correct answer:

\displaystyle \int_0^4 \frac{1}{4} x^2 \, dx = \displaystyle \left[ \frac{x^3}{12} \right]^4_0

= \displaystyle \frac{(4)^3}{12} - \frac{(0)^3}{12}

= \displaystyle \frac{64}{12}

= \displaystyle \frac{16}{3}

Then I tell my students that they’ve probably known the solution of this one since they were kids… and I show them the classic video “Unpack Your Adjectives” from Schoolhouse Rock. They’ll watch this video with no small amount of confusion (“How is this possibly connected to calculus?”)… until I reach the 1:15 mark of the video below, when I’ll pause and discuss this children’s cartoon. This never fails to get an enthusiastic response from my students.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, be sure to watch the first 75 seconds of the video below. I think you’ll be amused.

Circumference

Source: http://www.xkcd.com/1184/

Further comments, from Nicholas Vanserg, “Mathmanship,” The American Scientist, Vol. 46, No. 3 (1958):

In an article published a few years ago, the writer intimated with befitting subtlety that since most concepts of science are relatively simple (once you understand them), any ambitious scientist must, in self-preservation, prevent his colleagues from discovering that his ideas are simple too…

The object of… Mathmanship is to place unsuspected obstacles in the way of the pursuer until he is obliged, by a series of delays and frustrations, to give up the chase and concede his mental inferiority to the author…

[U]se a superscript as a key to a real footnote. The knowledge seeker reads that S is -36.7^{14} calories and thinks, “Gee what a whale of a lot of calories,” until he reads to the bottom of the page, finds footnote 14 and says, “oh.”