Calculus Made Easy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Calculus Made Easy
CalculusMadeEasy ThompsonFg2&3.jpg
Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Phillips Thompson, Fig. 2 & 3
AuthorSilvanus P. Thompson
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genreinfinitesimal calculus
Publication date
1910
Websitecalculusmadeeasy.org

Calculus Made Easy is a book on infinitesimal calculus originally published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject. The original text continues to be available as of 2008 from Macmillan and Co., but a 1998 update by Martin Gardner is available from St. Martin's Press which provides an introduction; three preliminary chapters explaining functions, limits, and derivatives; an appendix of recreational calculus problems; and notes for modern readers. Gardner changes "fifth form boys" to the more American sounding (and gender neutral) "high school students," updates many now obsolescent mathematical notations or terms, and uses American decimal dollars and cents in currency examples.

Calculus Made Easy ignores the use of limits with its epsilon-delta definition, replacing it with a method of approximating (to arbitrary precision) directly to the correct answer in the infinitesimal spirit of Leibniz, now formally justified in modern nonstandard analysis and smooth infinitesimal analysis.

The original text is now in the public domain under US copyright law (although Macmillan's copyright under UK law is reproduced in the 2008 edition from St. Martin's Press). It can be freely accessed on Project Gutenberg.

External links[]

The book itself

Video

About the book
  • Nature, Vol. 86, No. 2158 (March 9, 1911), p. 41, doi:10.1038/086041c0; a review of the first edition; available here and here.
  • Baez, John (20 March 2020). "How to Learn Math and Physics". Retrieved 29 July 2021.
  • Carl Linderholm, College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (January, 2000), pp. 77-79; a review of Silvanus P. Thompson, revised by Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy (St. Martin's Press, 1998).
Retrieved from ""