A Tour of the Calculus

Berlinski is writing in an arena where there arre a lot of heavy hitters: James Newmans "The World of Mathematics", Gamows "One, Two, Three, Infinity" and other books, "The Histoty of Pi", and so forth. A number of excellent writers have taken up the challange of presenting important mathematical concepts to a general audience. Berlinskis intent is to impart to the reader a feeling of what the calculus as well as its historical evolution and import. He sets for himself the difficult task of teaching you the calculus while simultaneously entertaining and diverting you. This is not an easy task, and Berlinski is only partially successful at doing so.

The intial half of the book tends to give the mathematics short shrift while the author waxes effusively over an assortment of historical tidbits. Some are fascinating, some merely diverting, but Berlinskis can be a little off-putting. Hes one of those authors who is enamored of italics; every other sentence seems to have a word or phrase italicized in an attempt to emphasize certain notions that he thinks are important. But this is an amateurs technique, as well as a rather annoying affectation. If a thought cannot be conveyed by words alone, attempting to add suggested vocal inflections doesnt help convey the information any better.

The latter half of the book has some good (though brief) explainations of a number of important topics, but theyre too terse to really instructional and too dense to be something the casual reader can look at say oh, I see, and go on.

I suspect the best audience for this book would be a student just beginning the study of calculus, or perhaps a gifted high school student looking for something to inspire him or her to go off in search of more didactic works.

And yes dear "Love mathematics, love literature, hate this damn book" a map has everything to do with coordinate systems! Read the book again, slowly...