I’m not completely out of touch with youth culture. I know how integral popular music is to your sense of self, to your connection to the urban lifestyle and 100 dollar white t-shirts, how intimately you relate to the lyrics of your favorite songs, particularly the rap music. What you probably didn’t realize is how ingrained calculus is within rap lyrics. “No Limit” by Wiz Khalifa, for example, details the three ways a limit fails to exist while extolling the relative virtues of recreational drug use. “Integration” the non-musical interlude on Ice Cube’s The Predator from 1992, released in the wake of the LA riots, references the inverse relationship between integration and differentiation in the context of racial segregation. Even the peerless wordsmith Eminem has joined the dragonesque legion of rappers wanting to spit fire about calculus concepts. Putting himself into the role of a differentiable function in the song “So Bad,” Slim Shady rhymes, “I’mma make you learn to appreciate me, differentiate me.”

Your goal with this project is to emulate this respectable group of musicians by creating a musical parody of a well-known song, rap or otherwise, making complex calculus concepts accessible to a new audience. Realizing that we live within a digitally-enhanced, visually-stimulated era, we will be presenting this parody as a polished and professionally-edited music video.