Algebraic Calculus

So I’m doing two things:

• I’m showing that the idea of differential forms, which crystallised around a hundred years ago, allied to the concept of simplexes, suffices as a foundation to develop the entire body of the calculus easily and quickly, and gives a much more coherent line of development.
• I’m putting it in a way that is clear, readable and, hopefully, entertaining. So I have preferred English readability to mathematical formality wherever reasonably possible.

Along the way, I cover in some depth various supporting fields such as Vector Algebra, with an introduction to the up-and-coming area of Geometric Algebra, and I also give a good, but more critical, introduction to the subject of Generalised Functions. The book ends with a brief introduction to Projective Geometry.

The salient original features of the book can be summarised as these:

• I introduce differentiation using the exterior derivative on a scalar function to generate a 1-form, so making it multivariate from the start.
• I define integration as a product between a differential form and a simplex.
• I use the axioms of a group to show that the addition of angles in the circle leads naturally to the idea of complex numbers.
• The book incorporates geometric algebra into the presentation of vector algebra and analysis from an early stage.
• Generalised Functions are introduced fully based on differential forms, and this treatment prepares the way for an advanced coverage of Fourier and Laplace transforms.

In the account of this first edition, I said: “I make no bones about the fact that I’m not happy with any of the existing presentations of Generalised Functions and that I have deep reservations about the Fourier Inversion Theorem. A natural result should eventually have a natural proof. There’s no question that this has been achieved for Stokes’s Theorem, which initially required a somewhat tortuous proof, but when developed in the recast framework of Differential Geometry falls out automatically as the general extension of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. In the present treatment I regard both of these as so basic that they are effectively definitions of different grades of Integration and to all intents and purposes need no proof.”

This edition of the book is currently out of print, but the second edition is out as of the end of June 2016, and resolves the questions which dissatisfied me above.

The book will be for sale directly through Amazon.

It is now possible to download full colour copies of the illustrations from this website using the button below.

If you have any enquiries in the meantime, contact me directly through the Contact page for further enquiries.

If you’d like a preview, you can browse through some sample Sections of the first edition of the book in PDF format in this page.

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