What is Calculus?

A few days ago, I honestly could not tell you the answer to the question "What is Calculus?"

Yes, I did take calculus (even did well on the AP exam) but it's been a long time (we're talking decades not years here) since I did anything involving calculus. Yes, I could take a simple derivative but, frankly, I just didn't remember much more than that.

However, a friend of mine (who spent several years as an electrical engineer before becoming an AP calculus teacher) and I started a new site dedicated to Calculus and higher math. To clarify our roles, he brings the calculus to the table and I bring the 'make it a web page.' I hope that this site will become a useful resource for any calculus student and teacher!

Anyway, I will not paraphrase the whole page, but if you want to know "What Calculus is", then simply visit this page. Trust me, if I got it, so will you.

Math Resources: Slope of a Line

Since this is a blog about Pain Free Homework site (www.painfreehomwork.com) I thought it'd be fitting to talk about a topic that causes many student's pain: Math. Hopefully, this will help alleviate your math homework pain!

I wanted to dedicate a post to a topic in math that just doesn't go away: The Slope of A line. It comes up in calculus, algebra and even, often, in geometry! At the bottom of the post, is a picture of the general formula from slope , and I wanted to list out the best resources (to my knowledge) for understanding slope of a line:

• Interactive Slope Applet -Great applet lets you drag 2 points around to explore how the slope formula works
• Slope of A line Tutorial - A great one stop place for understanding how slope works, includes power point style walk through, many examples, pictures
• Slope from Graph -
• Slope Formula Calculator -Type in two points and this baby'll do the rest!
• Slope Worksheet - free pdf with answer key on slope

If you know of other good resources on slope, let me know in the comments!

Mortgage Calculator-Fee Cool New Tool

I wanted to write a quick post about great new free online calculator/tool for anyone who wants to see how mortgage payments and amortizations work.

Meta-Calculator.com's free online mortgage calculator provides much more than just a simple loan amortization table. It also shows you, graphically, how much of your money goes to towards the principal and how much goes to the interest. You can see this as both a bar graph and a pie chart.

It's definitely a handy fee online tool for anyone who is either thinking of getting a mortgage or simply wants to understand how the payments look over time.

Changes are Coming

Math Warehouse.com 's question and answer service has some major changes coming...more details to follow over the next week or two.

Meta-Calculator-Awesome free calculator

If you are looking for an awesome free online graphing calculator, check out Meta Calculator .

It's list of features are really comprehensive and have already been listed at length in other blogs including Tutor Vista's blog post about the calculator , this blog post of the calculator or this one!

For those of you who want a very quick overview of the calculator's features,t hey include

• Graph up to 7 equations


• Output a table of values for each equation


• Trace points of each equation


• Solve Systems of Equations


• Calculate Regressions


• Perform other advanced statistical analysis like T-Test, standard deviation

Try the calculator out and, if you like it, you can buy the app version for your iphone/ipad. Either way, enjoy the free online version!

Hello World

More Coming soon...