Skip to 0 minutes and 15 seconds Many people find mathematics very, very frightening. From my point of view, there’s no need for that. And one thing people often find particularly frightening is something called calculus. Calculus is an absolutely crucial tool in understanding the design and the performance of motor racing vehicles, from how much fuel is going to be consumed to the downforce as you go along the straight and around a corner.
Skip to 0 minutes and 42 seconds On this MOOC you’ll be studying the two key ideas of calculus– that is, differentiation and integration. Differentiation is all about how things change. Integration’s about how we put all these little changes together to decide what happens in the future. In particular, we’ll be looking at who is the world’s fastest motor racing driver, why does the Earth go around the Sun, and how do we put a man on the moon. Leicester’s already got a lot of experience in delivering MOOCs, and this is all built on a long history of Leicester University providing distance-learning courses across a wide range of subjects. Our academics are creating distance-learning materials all the time.
Skip to 1 minute and 23 seconds Mathematics is a fantastic tool for answering some of the most interesting and strange questions from the world. For instance, how do we put a man on the moon? Or why, when we make a football of pentagons and hexagons, do we need exactly 12 pentagons? That’s why I love mathematics.
