Welcome to the Exciting Adventures in Differential Calculus

I recently read the following story about the early childhood of Thomas Edison, a great inventor who registered over one thousand patents in the United States.   The story goes like this and is widely believed.

One day, as a small child, Thomas Edison came home from school and gave a paper to his mother. He said to her "Mom, my teacher gave this paper to me and told me only you are to read it. What does it say?"

Her eyes welled with tears as she read the letter out loud to her child ...

"Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn't have good enough teachers to train him. Please teach him yourself."

Many years after Edison's mother had died, he became one of the greatest inventors of the century.

One day he was going through a closet, and he found the folded letter that his old teacher wrote his mother that day. He opened it ...

The message written on the letter was "Your son is mentally deficient. We cannot let him attend our school anymore. He is expelled."

Edison became emotional reading it and then wrote in his diary:

"Thomas A. Edison was a mentally deficient child whose mother turned him into the genius of the Century."

With only a cursory investigation I found that someone took slivers of truth and composed a heart- warming story that is not true.  Nevertheless, there is a parallel with Ashraf Iqbal’s experience with his teacher in mathematics, who gave up on him and told his mother that Ashraf cannot learn mathematics.  His mother who was herself a teacher, coached him in mathematics at home. Ashraf turned out to be the most vociferous critic of teaching methods and after his formal retirement he made teaching Calculus that is the language of science and engineering the goal of his life.  For almost ten years now he has been offering workshops to students, teachers and whoever was willing to participate.  When he is teaching, his emphasis is on developing curiosity and love for learning.  He challenges his students and workshop attendees with questions and does not accept an answer that is not argued and well justified.    In his discussions, he would point to a different situation where the argument they formulated to get the answer to his previous question would lead to an answer different from what they had believed was correct. This way he has been teaching the art of learning and has been continuously improving the way he teaches and revising what he teaches and real-life examples he uses to sharpen the critical skills.
 

I have the greatest pleasure and honor for being asked to write a few words about Ashraf Iqbal and what you have before you.  This is the apotheosis of his informal work life that he devoted to teaching calculus and I hope will be remembered as most innovative teacher of calculus.

Asif M. Hassan

Ex-Chairman Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Western New England College (Now a university)

Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A.