More than three centuries after its creation,
calculus remains a dazzling intellectual achievement and
the gateway into higher mathematics. This book charts
its growth and development by sampling from the work of
some of its foremost practitioners, beginning with Isaac
Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the late
seventeenth century and continuing to Henri Lebesgue at
the dawn of the twentieth - mathematicians whose
achievements are comparable to those of Bach in music or
Shakespeare in literature. William Dunham lucidly
presents the definitions, theorems, and proofs.
''Students of literature read Shakespeare; students of
music listen to Bach,'' he writes. But, this tradition
of studying the major works of the ''masters'' is, if
not wholly absent, certainly uncommon in
mathematics.This book seeks to redress that situation.
Like a great museum, ''The Calculus Gallery'' is filled
with masterpieces, among which are Bernoulli's early
attack upon the harmonic series (1689), Euler's
brilliant approximation of pi (1779), Cauchy's classic
proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus (1823),
Weierstrass's mind-boggling counterexample (1872), and
Baire's original ''category theorem''
(1899).Collectively, these selections document the
evolution of calculus from a powerful but logically
chaotic subject into one whose foundations are thorough,
rigorous, and unflinching - a story of genius triumphing
over some of the toughest, most subtle problems
imaginable. Anyone who has studied and enjoyed calculus
will discover in these pages the sheer excitement each
mathematician must have felt when pushing into the
unknown. In touring ''The Calculus Gallery'', we can see
how it all came to be. |
|