what calculus wants . . . and how it gets what it wants. In a nutshell, calculus wants to make hard problems simpler. It is utterly obsessed with simplicity. That might come as a surprise to you, given that calculus has a reputation for being complicated. And there’s no denying that some of its leading textbooks exceed a thousand pages and weigh as much as bricks. But let’s not be judgmental. Calculus can’t help how it looks. Its bulkiness is unavoidable.
