Calculus Made Easy

'What one fool can do, another can.' With this motto, the physicist Silvanus P. Thompson sets out to free readers from their fear of calculus. He explains that the frightening symbol d simply means 'a little bit of', so that dx is a little bit of x, and that integration is just adding up all the little bits. Step by step, with friendly humour and many worked examples, he shows how to differentiate and integrate common functions, find maxima and minima, and solve practical problems, with exercises and answers at the end of each chapter.

Thompson (1851–1916), a professor of physics in London, first published the book anonymously in 1910, and it has never gone out of print; it is still recommended to students who find the usual textbooks hard. Calculus is the language of modern physics, as Einstein's own popular book, Relativity, shows.