Preface
This is a working textbook about Calculus, Intuitively. Replace this preface with your own: say what the book covers, who it is for, and what a reader should be able to do by the end. The paragraphs below are a scaffold — keep the callout tour and the two notes at the bottom, and rewrite the rest.
What this book assumes
State the background you take for granted, and the background you do not. Where a concept matters and the reader may not have it, the book teaches it — in enough depth to reason correctly and no more.
The goal is not encyclopedic coverage. It is the load-bearing set of ideas: the ones that actually come up when you use this material to make a decision.
How to read it
The callouts do specific jobs, and you can lean on them:
Intuition
The one-sentence mental model. If you remember nothing else from a section, remember the intuition box.
Analogy
A concrete comparison. Analogies are lies that fit in your head; each one leaks somewhere, and we say where.
Wait, why?
A pointed question a sharp reader — an interviewer, a collaborator, a skeptic — would put to you, and the crisp answer behind it.
Note
A useful detail that would otherwise interrupt the flow.
Common trap
A place people reliably get it wrong.
Every jargon term is defined the first time it appears, and collected in the glossary at the back.
This book is AI-generated
Every chapter here was drafted by a large language model and then checked against the primary literature it cites. Zorian commissioned and edited it as a way to learn this subject by synthesizing the current sources, in a field Zorian does not yet work in hands-on. That origin has consequences worth stating plainly:
- It can be confidently wrong. Where a claim matters to you, follow the citation to the source. Citations are verified against the real papers, but interpretation can still err.
- It reflects a snapshot in time. Fast-moving fields drift; treat dated specifics as of the drafting date, not today.
- It is a learning artifact, not an authority. The aim is an honest, well-sourced synthesis to learn from — not a substitute for the papers, textbooks, and practitioners it points to.
If you find an error, the source repository is the place to raise it.
A note on how this book is made
This is a folder of linked HTML files generated from Markdown by a small Python build.
The table of contents lives in one file (toc.py); the prose lives in content/.
A chapter that is not written yet renders as a navigable stub from its planned outline, so the whole book is always browsable.
See CLAUDE.md for the authoring workflow.
Nothing here is final. It is a scaffold meant to be argued with, corrected, and filled in.