I found the best way to truly understand and enjoy calculus was to learn it as it was historically developed https://youtu.be/HRD9X-2Bmdw and then learning about the problems they ran into and how we ended up with modern Calculus after Euler and Lagrange tried to correct these problems https://youtu.be/fCZ8jJCVinU (these lectures cover Stillwell's book Mathematics and it's History)
Interesting in the second lecture is how Australia does 'photo radar' on one stretch of highway, where it records you going through a gate at one point, then many kilometers away records you again from another gate, then establishes your average velocity between the two gates using Calculus and sends you a ticket if your calculated average shows you must have exceeded the speed limit during some point between the gates.
> best way to truly understand and enjoy calculus was to learn it as it was historically developed
In fact, I'd argue it's the best way to understand almost anything, especially in math. Many topics I found somewhat confusing at school or university or whatever got really simple once I learned about their history. Little by little I come to feel that most of great inventions or discoveries made by people we regard as geniuses are often brilliant at how clear, beautiful and somewhat unexpected the solution was, but it's actually very rarely complicated and usually seems like the most natural thing in the world, when told about how Fourier/Laplace/Leibniz/etc discovered it, and not hidden behind standard school math curriculum.
That's a part of why I love 3Blue1Brown videos so much, and why I love Morris Kline books. And it always makes me kind of sad feeling how much time I wasted trying to come to terms with something that always was just unnatural explanation.
Morris Kline's book "Calculus: An Intuitive and Practical Approach" is still in print. I prefer the paper version because the Kindle version has many formatting problems.
I swear one day I'm going to write a WebExtension whose sole purpose is to auto pin comments about 3B1B's videos on calculus and linear algebra HN threads.
