Ten Reasons for Not Naming Your Cat Calculus (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781540764195)

My publisher told me that this was the place in the book where I should include all the pretentious crap about myself that I could muster. He said just don't end a sentence with a preposition (or proposition) or mix up you're and your, but other than that include everything I could think of. My writing career began on a dark and stormy night when my famed travelwriter wife suggested our funds were trending low, that I might do my part by writing a best-selling [cough] math book. I said that might be a good idea since my experience in the writing field was established long ago when I spilled a bottle of writing ink on the dress of my first-grade teacher, Miss. Altman, an innocent accident for which she had no quarter. After that came college and my English professor, Mr. Kerrigan, who gave me a D in Eng Comp 101 for my refusal to follow all those fuddy-duddy old rules about composition and English usage. But things turned around for me after I became a college professor and began accumulating desk drawers of pedagogical tailings. In my attempt to pass on learned words of wisdom to future generations, I spent weekends rummaging through pages of old notes and lesson plans, summarizing their contents in 1,000-word essays. I was ill at ease over the less-than-Harvard-level of scholarship of my writings, and so I published them anonymously in various less-than-Harvard-level publications under the name Nats Wolraf, the mirror image of my first and last names, Stan Farlow. Although Nat's career as a purveyor of mathematical nuances never reached the stratosphere like those of fellow Mainer, Stephen King, they did provide motivation for Nats to carry on. Once I got infected with that time-honored habit, I reached out to the textbook field, where no doubt, at this very moment there are legions of students poking about in one of my seminal texts on calculus, finite math and partial differential equations, no doubt using my name in vain. Did they actually think the answers to the problems came with the book?