Calculus Made Easy | Silvanus P. Thompson, Martin Gardner

Calculus Made Easy | Silvanus P. Thompson, Martin Gardner | First Calculus Book

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Calculus Made Easy

	Calculus Made Easy Silvanus P. Thompson, Martin Gardner St. Martin's Press, 1998 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 77 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Calculus Made Easy has long been the most popular calculus primer, and this major revision of the classic math text makes the subject at hand still more comprehensible to readers of all levels. With a new introduction, three new chapters, modernized language and methods throughout, and an appendix of challenging and enjoyable practice problems, Calculus Made Easy has been thoroughly updated for the modern reader.

Old classic still the best

Syvanus Thompson wrote numerous books on physics and electromagnetism, math, and engineering topics during his lifetime, but he's most remembered for this great little primer on calculus. Now refurbished by the redoubtable Martin Gardner, who was in his eighties when this was published, if I remember right, it has even more appeal than before. I was most familiar with Gardner from his 25 year stint as mathematical games editor at Scientific American, and for his classic book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, one of the great classics of science writing.

I've seen dozens of books that purport to teach calculus and math more painlessly, and most fall far short of their intended goal. But this is one that hits the mark. It's much clearer and more concise than the usual textbook treatments, and after this, you could consult those books for more information. But if you just want the basic idea without too much trouble and hassle, this book is the best I've seen. It ranks with Lacelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million as one of the great teaching books on math or science of the past century.

My test for this book was to look ahead at the integration section, which is much harder to teach than differentiation, but the author does equally well here. The worked examples are well chosen and proceed step by step. Occasionally, there was a simplfication step that I had to go over several times due to my own rustiness, but overall, this is the best primer on the subject I've seen.

Sometimes the wording is a little quaint, but that just makes it more endearing, which isn't an easy feat for your typical intimidating math book.

By the way, if you're looking for a good book on Advanced Calculus after this one, Advanced Calculus Demystified by David Bachman is the best book I've seen for easily explaining this difficult subject.

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First Calculus Book

This book is a classic. Richard Feinmann, the Nobel prize-winning physicist said that he first learned calculus from this book. The book is hard-covered but a little on the small side. Still, it has three new chapters added to better explain functions, limits, and differentials. Many regard this as the BEST first calculus book ever made. Incidentally, I found a marvelous SECOND-best book at Amazon to go with it. Titled:"Teach Yourself Calculus" by P. Abbott and Hugh Neil. For those who need calculus, these works should be sold as bookends.

the bridge between a calculus textbook and actual understanding

This book casually fills in the blanks between knowing what calculus looks like and why it is that it actually works. The authors make it comfortable to get into understanding the calculus without one intimidating and lifeless mechanism after another. This would not be a good book to learn calculus from, but it is truly the best complement to a standard calculus textbook.

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calculus made worse

Martin Gardner is a busybody who has removed much of the charm from a great work of populist mathematics. Read the earlier editions before Mr. Gardner got hold of it.

What is the point of rendering "first form boys" into "high school students"?, and many other things. Does he think we are too too stupid to appreciate that terminology was different 100 years ago in Britain?

The three stars are for Mr Gardner, S. P Thompson would have got more. This has been one of my favorite works since I was introduced to it by a classmate in honors calculus at Harvard in 1960.

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Calculus Lite

The important thing to remember about this book is that it is calculus made easy - because it's easy calculus! It probably is not going to help you figure out problem # 64 in your 10 lb, 1000 page monster text. The other reviewers have noted that it does present basic concepts in an easy to understand format and it is useful for getting down those basics. But the problems tend to be the easy drill type found in the beginning of problem sets and there is a vast amount of material that is simply not covered. This book is probably more useful for the 'soft calculus' type of course. So if you really want to learn limits, the Fundamental Theorem, etc., go back and sweat the monster text.

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