Calculus Made Easy

Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson and Martin Gardner has long been the most popular calculus primer.

This major revision of the classic math text makes the subject at hand still more comprehensible to readers of all levels. With a new introduction, three new chapters, modernized language and methods throughout, and an appendix of challenging and enjoyable practice problems, Calculus Made Easy has been thoroughly updated for the modern reader.

Table of Contents

I. To Deliver You from the Preliminary Terrors

II. On Different Degrees of Smallness

III. On Relative Growings

IV. Simplest Cases

V. Next Stage. What to Do with Constants

VI. Sums, Differences, Products, and Quotients

VII. Successive Differentiation

VIII. When Time Varies

IX. Introducing a Useful Dodge

X. Geometrical Meaning of Differentiation

XI. Maxima and Minima

XII. Curvature of Curves

XIII. Partial Fractions and Inverse Functions

XlV. On True Compound Interest and the Law of Organic Growth

Xv. How to Deal with Sines and Cosines

XVI. Partial Differentiation

XVII. Integration

XVIII. Integrating as the Reverse of Differentiating

XIX. On Finding Areas by Integrating

XX. Dodges, Pitfalls, and Triumphs

XXI. Finding Solutions

XXII. A Little More about Curvature of Curves

XXIII. How to Find the Length of an Arc on a Curve

Table of Standard Forms

About the Authors

Silvanus P. Thompson, born in 1851, was elected to the Royal Society in 1891. He wrote numerous technical books and manuals on electricity, magnetism, dynamos, and optics, as well as several popular biographies of prominent scientists. His works include Calculus Made Easy. Thompson died in 1916.

Martin Gardner, born in 1914, has written several reviews for The New York Review of Books and was a Scientific American columnist for over twenty-five years. His books include Calculus Made Easy and When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish. He lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina.