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This is in part intro into calculus for the general public, part �� a history of this branch of math, part �� unusual current application of calculus, from GPS to drug regiments for HIV-infected to using wavelets to achieve fingerprints for FBI. I read is as a part of monthly reading for February 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

The book starts with famous (in narrow circles of math fans) quip by Richard Feynman that “Calculus is the language God talks.�� That was said to the writer Herman Wouk about the Manhattan Project. The latter made several attempts to learn it but failed each time, so the goal of the book is to allow ‘not-math�� people to understand main concepts.

Historically it starts with Archimedes, Zeno and Pythagoreans, shifting to Galileo and Kepler, then to Fermat and Descartes, and finally to Newton and Leibniz; several later mathematicians are mentioned, like Fourier, Sophie Germain, Gauss, Kovalevskaya and Poincaré. Non-European contributions are mentioned but quite briefly. This reads as a very interesting research about people and problems they face and even if you are not interested in calculus, it is still a great non-fic history of science and discoveries.