Everyday calculus Discovering the hidden math all around us

This book's premise is simple: even in people's everyday routines, calculus lurks in the background. Fernandez (Wellesley College) presents a broad array of ordinary events like REM sleep, drinking coffee, commuting to work, setting aside money for retirement, catching a cold, enjoying tandoori chicken, and watching a movie. The author then ties each aspect to pertinent mathematics like the trigonometry of sleep cycles, laws of cooling, average rates of change, exponential and logistic models, infinite series, and optimization. The reader should be familiar with the basic principles of first-year calculus to appreciate the mathematical content. However, audiences can still fully enjoy the book without getting bogged down with the equations and formulas, as the more technical manipulations are delayed until the appendixes. Certainly the unfolding of events is not at all contrived, and Fernandez is especially effective when linking together seemingly disparate activities for which the underlying mathematical basis is identical. As the subtitle of the book suggests, the thrust is more one of "discovering the hidden math all around us" rather than showing "how mathematics is used," which provides an honest and very pleasurable journey. --Ned W. Schillow, emeritus, Lehigh Carbon Community College

For every befuddled math student who's ever sat in class and thought, "When am I ever going to use this?" Fernandez, assistant professor of mathematics at Wellesley College, gleefully reveals the truth: the world really does run on math. He takes a day-in-the-life approach to his subject: getting out of bed introduces trigonometry and how it can be used to describe and predict sleep cycles, while water running from a faucet allows him to address gravity and how its influence shapes motion into parabolic curves. The morning news leads to derivatives and how they can chart unemployment rates and population growth. A stray thought during a morning meeting stirs up the calculus of catching cold. Whether describing how biology uses math to design more efficient organs and body structures or the best way to figure out when to overhaul a subway car, Fernandez keeps the tone light, as entertaining as it is informative. The book will speak most strongly to readers with some experience in trigonometry and basic calculus, but it's also accessible to those willing to put in a little extra effort. Either way, Fernandez's witty, delightful approach makes for a winning introduction to the wonderland of math behind the scenes of everyday life. Illus. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.