Calculus Made Easy

Short description: 1910 book on infinitesimal calculus by Silvanus P. Thompson

Calculus Made Easy

Author	Silvanus P. Thompson
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	infinitesimal calculus
Publication date	1910
Text	Calculus Made Easy at Wikisource
Website	calculusmadeeasy.org

If the “curve” happens to be a straight line, the value of [math]\displaystyle{ \tfrac {dy}{dx} }[/math] will be the same at all points along it. In other words its slope is constant.

If a curve is one that turns more upwards as it goes along to the right, the values of [math]\displaystyle{ \tfrac {dy}{dx} }[/math] will become greater and greater with the increasing steepness.

Calculus Made Easy is a book on infinitesimal calculus originally published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject. The original text continues to be available as of 2008 from Macmillan and Co., but a 1998 update by Martin Gardner is available from St. Martin's Press which provides an introduction; three preliminary chapters explaining functions, limits, and derivatives; an appendix of recreational calculus problems; and notes for modern readers. Gardner changes "fifth form boys" to the more American sounding (and gender neutral) "high school students," updates many now obsolescent mathematical notations or terms, and uses American decimal dollars and cents in currency examples.

Calculus Made Easy ignores the use of limits with its epsilon-delta definition, replacing it with a method of approximating (to arbitrary precision) directly to the correct answer in the infinitesimal spirit of Leibniz, now formally justified in modern nonstandard analysis and smooth infinitesimal analysis.

The original text is now in the public domain under US copyright law (although Macmillan's copyright under UK law is reproduced in the 2008 edition from St. Martin's Press). It can be freely accessed on Project Gutenberg.

Further reading

• Nature, Vol. 86, No. 2158 (March 9, 1911), p. 41. doi:10.1038/086041c0. A review of the first edition. Internet Archive; Google Books.
• Carl Linderholm, College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (January, 2000), pp. 77-79. A review of Silvanus P. Thompson, revised by Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy (St. Martin's Press, 1998).

External links

• Silvanus P. Thompson, Calculus Made Easy: Being a Very-Simplest Introduction to Those Beautiful Methods of Reckoning which Are Generally Called by the Terrifying Names of the Differential Calculus and the Integral Calculus (New York: MacMillan Company, 2nd Ed., 1914). Also available as the (London: MacMillan and Co., Limited, 2nd Ed., 1914) printing, which isn't published under Thompson's name, but instead has the byline of "by F.R.S." (i.e., Fellow of the Royal Society).
• Calculus Made Easy at Project Gutenberg (Re-typeset in LaTeX)
• Calculus Made Easy online
• Baez, John (20 March 2020). "How to Learn Math and Physics". http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html#calculus. Retrieved 29 July 2021. 
• Calculus Made Easy on YouTube