
Ask HN: How to “Understand” Calculus? - imheretolearn
I am not talking about mugging up formulaes but to understand the fundamentals and what they actually mean?
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rolph
first you need to intuit how a cartesian coordinate system works so you
understand how a graph works

differential calculus is about rate of change: simplest case means slope or
rise over run, practical case means estimating the slope of the portion of a
curve.

    
    
      This can be a real physical curve or it can be a curve defined by a plot of numeric values on a graph
    

integral calculus is about estimating the area defined by a curve this is a
game of cutting the area up into pieces adding up all the regular pieces and
estimating the little pieces that fill in the edges.

FWIW to you here is a wiki link re calculus:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus)

and cartesian coordinate:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system)

for cartesian coordinate graphs you should understand euclidian geometry:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry)

and likewise euclidian geometry requires algebra:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra)

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tgflynn
That's an awfully general question. I would expect any high school or 1st year
college course or textbook to do a reasonably good job of providing you with
the basic intuition behind derivatives and integrals. It would help if you
could be more specific about exactly what it is you are trying to understand.

