Calculus and DNA

Introduction

I joke that I'm the only one in our Mathematical Biology seminar who was born before we had DNA. A lot of things have changed since Thomas [1951] developed his syllabus for calculus in the late 1940s; calculus isn't one of them. We compete for our undergraduates' time with amazing advances in many fields, including biology and computing. Some people are again clamoring to make statistics or combinatorics part of basic college mathematics.

Can we still do a good job in calculus if we and the students have less time for it? I think the answer is "yes," but it will require fundamental change.