Customer Reviews

Nicely Written but Omits Past 100 years - By: JAMES BATTLE, 22 Jan 2006
This nicely written book gives an excellent account of the history of calculus. Most of the material is elementary & should be accessible to a non-specialist audience.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Weierstrass & his non-differentiable function. This is the only (elementary) book I know, which includes a proof that this function is continuous but nowhere differentiable.

I'm disappointed that the story ends with Lebesgue & his theory of measure, which now dates back 100-years. The recent revival of “Riemann-style” techniques of integration, pioneered by Perron, Kurzweil, McShane & Henstock would have been interesting. Unlike Lebesgue’s theory, it would have been easy to present the intuition behind the Henstock integral. This would make it more apparent that Mathematics is a “living” subject, which continues to be refined to this day.

It might also have been worth including a brief mention of the Ito-Doeblin “stochastic calculus” & how it led to the Black-Scholes theory of option pricing. This would relate nicely to the chapter on Weirstrass & his “pathological” function.