History of PreCalculus

by

J. Douglas Faires and James DeFranza

The first edition of this PreCalculus book, which appeared in 1997, was designed for a one-term course to prepare students for the College and University calculus sequence. Students are provided the necessary review of algebra,trigonometry, and analytic geometry in the context that these subjects are used in calculus. We capitalized the C in the title of the book to emphasize this fact, and to distinguish our treatment from the normal Precalculus book, which tends to be designed for remediation.

The Second Edition of PreCalculus was released in August of 1999. Numerous modifications were made to the text based on a survey that was sent to all the users of the first edition. In addition, all the exercise sets were reconstructed to ensure that they represented the material in the book. The compact size of the book (366 pages) was maintained to ensure that all the major topics can be covered in one term.

The Third Edition of PreCalculus was made available in the Fall of 2003. Between the second and third editions, numerous refinements and modifications were made to provide students with an intuitive, yet mathematically accurate, treatment of precalculus. The context and terminology in this PreCalculus book is the same that students will see in a calculus course. One change that is worth noting here is the third edition is produced using a modest treatment of four color. The added color is introduced for pedagogical reasons, and in particular to clearly describe how problems can be reduced to simpler problems with the solution following from the solution of the easier problems.

The Fourth Edition of PreCalculus was published in November of 2006 and we are pleased that this edition remains true to our original goal of providing students with a one-term precalculus course that leaves no gap between the end of precalculus and the beginning of calculus. Some of the new features that are included in this edition are additional application exercises to further emphasize the importance of precalculus and of the calculus course that the students will soon be taking, and the expansion of the four color format.