I am in the process of redesigning the calculus course that I have taught five or six times. What I would like to know is if anyone has some really good examples or exercises that I could either do in class or give as a project. In particular, I've found that I don't have many good examples/exercises that illustrate the awesomeness of the main theorems (Intermediate Value Theorem, Mean Value Theorem, etc.). All levels of difficulty are certainly appreciated. The intent is to have material that I can present or assign here and there throughout the course that goes beyond basic calculus and will challenge even those to whom math comes naturally.


An example of what I'm looking for is something like showing a continuous function on $S^1$ has to map two antipodal points to the same value.


EDIT: In response to Qiaochu Yuan, Calc I and II together form all of single variable calculus. For Calc I: limits, differentiation, Riemann integration (improper as well). For Calc II: sequences, series, polar coordinates, parametric coordinates. The old book for this course was Stewart's "Calculus: Early Transcendentals", but I don't follow any book when I teach.



Interesting Calculus Questions/Exercises
You only need integration by parts to prove the irrationality of $\pi$. I'm having
my Calculus 2 students do it as a long-term group project starting Monday.


Then when you've done partial fractions, you can have them derive the quickly-converging BBP formula for $\pi$.


And you can have them do the "18th Century Style" Euler argument for evaluating
$\sum\_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2}$.


Here's a link to two of these:
<http://homepages.wmich.edu/~jstrom/PiProjects/>


