Calculus Made Easy 2008

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Calculus Made Easy 2008



Silvanus Phillips Thompson FRS (June 19, 1851 – June 12, 1916) was a professor of physics at the City and Guilds Technical College in Finsbury, England. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1891 and was known for his work as an electrical engineer and as an author. Thompson's most enduring publication is his 1910 text Calculus Made Easy, which teaches the fundamentals of calculus, and is still available as a supplemental textbook.[2] Thompson also wrote a popular physics text, Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism,[3] as well as biographies of Lord Kelvin and Michael Faraday.
From Scientific American
Equal-opportunity reviewers, we welcome a book on behalf of the continuum! It is for the mathematically eager who know some algebra. The first edition appeared anonymously in 1910 in England, and overall a million copies have been sold. In fact, most talk of continuum and its infinities is suppressed; the eye is nicely fixed on little bits of x, called dx, their differences and sums among all kinds of functions, their geometric meaning, and what they can do for you--a lot. Martin Gardner, himself an American mathematical landmark, says, "This is the leanest and liveliest introduction to calculus ever written," and, taken with his own present augmentation, three whole chapters and more, including infinite series and some neat problems, he is quite right. The times they are a-changing, and we admit we are not current in computer resources. Maybe "little bits of x" ought to--or have been--placed on the screen in a serious pedagogic structure that students can manipulate. Graphics programs that share the scope and spirit of Thompson/Gardner would make a valued complement to their paper-and-pencil book.

Review
"Calculus Made Easy is arguably the best math teaching ever. To a non-mathematician, its simplicity and clarity reveals the mathematical genius of Newton, Leibniz, and Thompson himself. Martin Gardner deserves huge thanks for renewing this great book."—Julian Simon, author of Population Matters

"A remarkable and user-friendly approach to the study of calculus, made even more so by Martin Gardner, the most highly acclaimed mathematical expositor of our time."—R.L. Graham, Chief Scientist, AT&T Labs, and author of Concrete Mathematics


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