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No cover — Steven H. Strogatz: Infinite Powers (2019, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company)

400 pages

English language

Published Nov. 6, 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

ISBN:: 978-1-328-88001-7

(1 review)

From preeminent math personality and author of The Joy of x, a brilliant and endlessly appealing explanation of calculus—how it works and why it makes our lives immeasurably better.

Without calculus, we wouldn’t have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound. We wouldn’t have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket.

Though many of us were scared away from this essential, engrossing subject in high school and college, Steven Strogatz’s brilliantly creative, down-to-earth history shows that calculus is not about complexity; it’s about simplicity. It harnesses an unreal number—infinity—to tackle real-world problems, breaking them down into easier ones and then reassembling the answers into solutions that feel miraculous.

Infinite Powers recounts how calculus tantalized and thrilled its inventors, starting with its first glimmers in ancient Greece and bringing us right up to the discovery of gravitational waves (a phenomenon predicted by calculus). …

From preeminent math personality and author of The Joy of x, a brilliant and endlessly appealing explanation of calculus—how it works and why it makes our lives immeasurably better.

Without calculus, we wouldn’t have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound. We wouldn’t have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket.

Though many of us were scared away from this essential, engrossing subject in high school and college, Steven Strogatz’s brilliantly creative, down-to-earth history shows that calculus is not about complexity; it’s about simplicity. It harnesses an unreal number—infinity—to tackle real-world problems, breaking them down into easier ones and then reassembling the answers into solutions that feel miraculous.

Infinite Powers recounts how calculus tantalized and thrilled its inventors, starting with its first glimmers in ancient Greece and bringing us right up to the discovery of gravitational waves (a phenomenon predicted by calculus). Strogatz reveals how this form of math rose to the challenges of each age: how to determine the area of a circle with only sand and a stick; how to explain why Mars goes “backwards” sometimes; how to make electricity with magnets; how to ensure your rocket doesn’t miss the moon; how to turn the tide in the fight against AIDS.

As Strogatz proves, calculus is truly the language of the universe. By unveiling the principles of that language, Infinite Powers makes us marvel at the world anew.

7 editions

xylogx reviewed Infinite Powers by Steven H. Strogatz

Loved this book

5 stars

I love calculus and I loved this book. If you do not love calculus you might not, but I feel like he does a good job of trying tell a story that is accessible even if you do not have a mathematical background. It is impossible for me to separate myself from my own mathematical background which is so intertwined in my personality, so this judgement on accessibility may need to be taken with a grain of salt. I do feel like the book is well organized and the chapters have good narrative structure. Objectively good on these matters of structure and story telling, I would be interested in how others who do not have maths backgrounds found this argument that he makes that “calculus is important and foundational to everything we do in the modern technological world.” and that “Calculus is truly the language of the universe”

Subjects

Archimedes
Differential calculus
Calculus, history