Louis Leithold

At age 72, after his retirement from Pepperdine, he began teaching calculus at Malibu High School, in Malibu, California, drilling his students for the Advanced Placement Calculus, and achieving considerable success. He regularly assigned two hours of homework per night, and had two training sessions at his own house that ran Saturdays or Sundays from 9AM to 4PM before the AP test. His teaching methods were praised for their liveliness, and his love for the topic was well known. He also taught workshops for calculus teachers. One of the people he influenced was Jaime Escalante, who taught math to minority students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Escalante’s subsequent success as a teacher is portrayed in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver.

Leithold attained master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to teach at Phoenix College (Arizona) (which has a math scholarship in his name), California State University, Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, Pepperdine University, and The Open University (UK). In 1968, Leithold published The Calculus, a “blockbuster best-seller” which simplified the teaching of calculus.

Louis Leithold (San Francisco, United States, 16 November 1924 – Los Angeles, 29 April 2005) was an American mathematician and teacher. He is best known for authoring The Calculus, a classic textbook about calculus that changed the teaching methods for calculus in world high schools and universities. Known as “a legend in AP calculus circles,” Leithold was the mentor of Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles high-school teacher whose story is the subject of the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver.