If you're one of those people who had a dreadful calculus teacher who convinced you the whole subject was both totally uninteresting and utterly beyond your comprehension, Steven Strogatz has written the book for you. He tells a wonderful story about the long history of calculus from Archimedes to Poincaré. He gives examples of many applications that show you why the abstractions of calculus are so useful in practice. But most importantly, he actually explains the core ideas of calculus in a simple, progressive way that enable nearly anyone to fully grasp the central insight. In other words, the book isn't just about the history of calculus and its applications -- you can actually learn calculus from it. In fact, the math in the book is explained so clearly and simply that they should probably just hand it out on the first day of math class. Sure, if you want to study advanced math or physics, you'll still need to power through all the rigor of delta-epsilon proofs and whatnot. But everyone else probably only needs to carefully read this one book to say they truly understand the central mathematical concept that Strogatz calls, "The Infinity Principle" -- you can solve a hard problem by differentiating it into infinitely many infinitesimally simple problems and then integrating their solutions back together.
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