Professor Lynn Garner Writes Calculus Book

Hello students! Have you had the wonderful privilege of taking a math class from one of our BYU Professors? If so, then have you had the extra privilege of that math class being one of the Calculus courses taught here? And if that last statement is true, did you take that class since 2002? If not, then you’ve been missing out on a wonderful new experience brought to us by the BYU Math Department. One of our professors, Professor Lynn Garner, http://www.math.byu.edu/~lynng/ has written a Calculus book. And frankly, it’s about time that the ENTIRE BYU Community learns about the contributions he’s made through his book.

This book has literally made waves in the small community of Provo, Utah since it has come into print. I myself have had first hand experience when dealing with the new found features it has in it.

The first and best feature of the book is the hundreds of errors that it has incorporated into the book. No other Math Book I’ve ever used has had this feature. I’ve even used 3 other calculus books before and don’t remember even once having the joyful experience of looking at a list of ‘errata’ and going through on each page of the book to correct the mistakes that were made on each one. You may be thinking to yourself: “What a horrendous thing! I would not wish to go through and correct pages on a book that I paid a significant amount of money for!” I thought so too until I realized what Professor Garner was doing: he was using the errors to make us go through and read the whole book and therefore we would learn more than we would from a book with no errors! Oh what subtle genius it took to write this book.

The next best feature is something that has been done to increase Student/Professor Relationships in the classroom. You see, in all of my previous math books I could go back and read explanations on calculus procedures and look at explanations of what to do and say to myself (I said this inside my head mind you. I had that Saying Inside My Head thing down pat by Sophomore year I’m proud to say) “Oh, now I see, the derivate of sinx = cosx” but with Professor Garner’s book, you can’t do that! With his book, you are instead required to go email your teacher, or call them up at their home and ask them. You might even be forced to ask 1 or maybe even 2 questions in class to further your understanding of Mathematics. Soon with this new system, you will come to know all of your Calculus professors intimately, and will be having Sunday dinner once a month with them and babysitting their kids on weekends, and racquetball every Tuesday and Thursday.

Teachers and students alike have come to love this book. I’ve heard students singing praises in the hallway, praises in the form of, “Oh boy, does this Math book by Professor Garner increase my dependence on learning from class rather than being able to rely on the book!” and teachers saying, “Thank goodness we have this calculus book which is clean and doesn’t contain all that darned cussing that our previous Calculus books had.”

Yes, Professor Garner has gone on to help many people through this book, people like the Bookstore, who cannot buy back used copies of this Calculus book because a new version comes out each year. People like students who used to have no social skills because they could just sit there and learn from a book instead of having to ask other people and students for help, and mostly, people like Bill Gates, by showing that it IS possible to develop a small monopoly, which can’t be governmentally shut down, by requiring all Calculus 1,2, & 3 classes at BYU to use his book. Oh Professor Garner, where would we be without your subtle genius?