Review by Choice Review
Tom Lehrer used to say that he was going to get rich writing a math book called "Tropic of Calculus," but he was just kidding. It may not make him rich, but Berlinski has written that book, albeit with a different title. Imagine the prose styles of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, and Stephen Hawking all rolled into one--you get the idea: Hawking, because this book finally does for Newton, after 300 years, what A Brief History of Time (CH, Jul'88) did for Einstein and his coterie; Didion, because Berlinski's former life as an academic brought him front and square with the darker side of California living; and Chandler, for the sheer sultriness of it. You can learn a lot of calculus from this book if you can clear the tears of laughter from your eyes long enough to see the words. Great for bright college grads who missed math the first time around and want to get the story now. Also for first-year undergraduates walking around with those telephone book-sized behemoths that still do not devote space to do the theory half as well as here, and never make anyone chuckle out loud. This is the only math book to ever take on a date. In these troubled times, it is nice to see a former academic mathematician making a productive contribution to society. All levels. D. V. Feldman University of New Hampshire
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Even those who flailed through calculus class sense the power and perfection of that branch of mathematics, and Berlinski rekindles the interest of lapsed students in this pleasing excursion through graphs and equations. Berlinski's goal is to explain the mystery of motion and the area and volume of irregular shapes, issues that gave rise to Leibnitz and Newton's invention of calculus. He makes his points one concept at a time, but not so dryly as asking and answering, "What is a function?" No, with dashes of biography or images of his walking around old Prague (to illustrate continuity), Berlinski tangibly grounds the abstract notions, so that attentive readers can ease into and grasp the several full-blown proofs he sets forth, as of the mean-value theorem. Though the math-shy won't necessarily jump to the blackboard to begin differentiating and integrating polynomial equations, Berlinski's animated presentation should tempt them to sit forward and appreciate the elegance of calculus--and perhaps banish recollections of its exam-time terrors. --Gilbert Taylor
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Berlinski (Black Mischief: The Mechanics of Modern Science, LJ 2/15/86) presents an unconventional work on the foundations of calculus. It is in part an informal history of the subject, the author inrerweaves the historical fragments with expository sections that explain the concepts from a modern viewpoint. He gives special attention (very appropriately) to the concept of limits and to several of the fundamental theorems that underpin calculus. He also shows how differential calculus deals with rates of change and how integral calculus works to determine areas under curves. Writing in a breezingly informal style, the author includes a plethora of humorous asides as well as a number of clearly fictitious anecdotes. At times his prose gets a bit too ripe, but the overall effect is to make the book quite readable. The work should be especially useful for providing perspective to college and advanced high school students currently learning calculus. Recommended for all public and college libraries.Jack W. Weigel, Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Here's another attempt to bridge the gap between the ""two cultures"" of the humanities and the sciences, this time by a mathematician/mystery novelist. In his introductory ""Note to the Reader,"" Berlinski (Less Than Meets the Eye, 1994, etc.) emphasizes that his goal is to provide not a textbook but a ""tour,"" offering the reader the sort of ""Aha!"" insight characteristic of math. To that end, he brings his novelist's equipment to bear on the subject, with well-drawn character portraits of the men who developed calculus (Newton and Leibniz in particular) and dramatic scenes featuring the author as an instructor with a recalcitrant college math class. There are proofs (presented in appendixes to each chapter), but no problems to solve. And the focus of the text is on the meaning and application of the central concepts of the calculus, as in the use of the first derivative to determine the speed of a falling body after a given elapsed time--one of the purposes for which the technique was invented. A reader who remembers algebra can follow most of the proofs, and the history of mathematics is interestingly presented. But the book goes off track in several ways. Berlinski's portrayal of his college calculus class suggests contempt for those who ""don't get"" math; considering how many readers may picture themselves among the author's reluctant students, this is not an asset. Too many sentences force the reader to stop and puzzle out the plain sense of what the author is saying rather than the mathematical point he is trying to illustrate. Minor factual errors intrude: The author attributes Millay's line ""Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare"" to Keats, then makes a point of Keats's ignorance of math. Finally, the labels on the diagrams often don't correspond to the text they illustrate, a source of potential confusion. A worthy attempt to bring an important scientific concept to the general reader; too bad the execution falls short of the ambition. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
