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Title: A Tour of the Calculus
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Manufacturer: Vintage
List Price: $14.95
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| Customer Reviews: |
| A Tour of the Calculus by Vintage Enough with the verbiage, already | Berlinski never met a metaphor he didn't like - even ones that are completely inappropriate to the concept he is trying to covey. The substantive material in this book could have been well covered in perhaps 40-50 pages, rather than the 309 pages he fills with a seemingly endless morass of words. He says of his subject "Mathematics is conceived in the fires of the real world, and the functions that bring twitching life to the calculus represent processes beyond the closed coffin of a coordinate system..." Oh PLEASE.
Do yourself a favor and skip this one. | | A Tour of the Calculus by Vintage Worse than useless | I found it fascinating that there are (at the time of writing) about as many 5's as 1's among the reviews of this book. As you can probably tell by the title, I am not a fan.
I confess that I did not read the whole book: I could not. As I went on, I found myself getting angry at this book, for reasons that I hope will be a little clearer by the end of the review. At that point I gave up on reading the whole book and dipped in here and there.
Here's what I think:
I found the prose purple, precious and pretentious (just like this sentence!-), but that is hardly the book's worst fault. Neither is the interjection of the author's opinions on things unrelated and irrelevant (the comment on the Duke University English Department springs to mind: a one-sentence insult is as inventive as the almost proverbial "your mama" - I find the Sokal Affair a much more effective and amusing skewering).
The worst fault of the book, imo, is that there was no light shed on the subject (nacreous or otherwise), no effulgence... (BTW, if you like these words, you *might* like the book but no guarantees). On the contrary, confusion and inaccuracy abound: the Dedekind cuts chapter is full of them for example - I had to go back to a real exposition (Ferrar's appendix in his 1938 book on "Convergence" fwiw) to regain my sanity. Somebody else pointed out the sine/cosine graph flub. The graph in the chapter on Rolle's theorem shows a function that does not satisfy the conditions of the theorem as stated two pages earlier. I found most of the explanations similarly confused and confusing: I cannot imagine how anybody can learn much from this book, be it beginner, expert or anywhere in between.
Somebody else mentioned that he enjoyed the "historical anecdotes". I 'm not sure that there are any that are not figments of Mr. Berlinski's imagination. Every time that he started a description that I assumed was factual, it ended by being clearly an invention of the author - and there was no way to tell where facts ended and invention began.
The author mentions the comment of his high school English teacher who said (I paraphrase from memory here, so the figure may be wrong, but the meaning should be clear): "Mr. Berlinski, once more you took ten pages to say nothing." The comment to some degree applies to the book. I can only assume that the poor editors who tried to cut it down to something reasonable gave up exhausted at the futility of the task.
So for me, the book fails as exposition or history of the subject. It also fails as entertainment. Is there anything left?
For an example of a book that I think is genuinely informative, honest, useful *and* entertaining, I suggest John Derbyshire's "Prime Obsession." Although you can get a whiff of Derbyshire's (rather quirky) political conservatism in the book, nevertheless the book is always about its subject (the Riemann hypothesis) and never becomes an object for the author's own aggrandizement. Mr. Berlinski's book in contrast is very much about Mr. Berlinski. | | A Tour of the Calculus by Vintage I Must Have Missed the Point | There are two kinds of people who might read this book: People who already know and understand calculus, and people who don't. The problem is, I can't see how either group is going to benefit from reading it. I can't imagine anyone learning calculus, or even being helped to learn it, by reading this. On the other hand, as a person who knows calculus (well, at least I know it well enough to teach it ...), I didn't find anything in this book that gave me a fresh insight or a possible new approach to teaching any particular topic.
All Berlinski has done here, it seems to me, is to take standard topics from pre-calculus and calculus, and talk about them with a different verbal and syntactical approach from what is usually used. He sort of alternates between an artificially folksy style in some sections, and a mildly pretentious quasi-poetic approach in others. The problem is, there are no really new ideas here - just new language.
One example: he discusses the irrationality of the square root of two, presenting the same proof that all mathematically literate people have seen again and again, and recasts the proof as a discussion between a taxi driver and a passenger. Cute, possibly, but there's nothing thought-provoking about it. If you already know the proof, you won't learn anything new from Berlinski's approach. On the other hand, if you haven't seen the proof, the taxicab discussion won't be any easier to understand (and won't be any more convincing) than the straightforward, formal proof that can be found in hundreds of ordinary textbooks.
Sorry, but this book did nothing for me. | | A Tour of the Calculus by Vintage Wow! And I thought I knew the basics of The Calculus. | | This is an excellent read. The book covers the fundamental principals of The Calculus in a historical context. The writing is excellent and the subject is well covered. This is not a textbook, and should be accessible to most readers. | | A Tour of the Calculus by Vintage always more than you expect | The only reason David Berlinski's books do not consistently receive the five-star evaluation is that people come to them with very pedestrian expectations. That has to be the problem. Berlinski is pure genius, a delight for the mind, a giant, a wonder. He is on my very very shortest list of writers to take to a desert island with no return ticket. Read anything he writes, including the articles that can be found on the Discovery Institute's website. Bravo, David Berlinski.
| | A Tour of the Calculus by Vintage Product Description | Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio. Even as he initiates us into the mysteries of real numbers, functions, and limits, Berlinski explores the furthest implications of his subject, revealing how the calculus reconciles the precision of numbers with the fluidity of the changing universe.
"An odd and tantalizing book by a writer who takes immense pleasure in this great mathematical tool, and tries to create it in others."--New York Times Book Review |
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