This makes for heavy lifting if you had assumed it would be a good, light airplane read.
The author has included a list of people and what they contributed and a timeline that helps some, but the book really needs those things. On the other hand, if you are an historian who is not comfortable with math, you may find the interspersed mathematical diagrams a bit daunting to follow. It is sort of 17th-century “inside baseball.” The names and dates come very thick and fast if you are not already a student of history, then you may find it demanding to follow all of the characters. The net result is that it is a little tough to define the audience for this book. While the book has many anecdotes that would be good to drop while teaching, there are too many of them to keep track of very easily and they are presented in ways that are rich with background, so rich that it is hard to keep track of who wanted to do what it would be difficult to pull out one story, since they are all packed into a dense weave that is not easy to pull apart. What I found was that the book had rather too many interesting sidelights, all heavily intertwined. So it was with this in mind that I embarked on this book to see if I could extract some stories about people and concepts that I could add to my repertoire. A few tidbits about Descartes can make y = mx + b more palatable to the math-phobe sometimes. As someone who has taught math classes to people afraid of math, I have found that sometimes attaching a bit of history and a human being to a concept makes it seem somehow more approachable. This book has a rather grandiose title and an interesting premise: take one important concept from the history of mathematics (the ability to split up a line into infinitesimally small parts), and trace its path through the very turbulent 1600s.
Pulsing with drama and excitement, Infinitesimal will forever change the way you look at a simple lineand celebrates the spirit of discovery, innovation, and intellectual achievement. We see how a small mathematical disagreement became a contest over the nature of the heavens and the earth: Was the world entirely known and ruled by a divinely sanctioned rationality and hierarchy? Or was it a vast and mysterious place, ripe for exploration? The legitimacy of popes and kings, as well as our modern beliefs in human liberty and progressive science, hung in the balance the answer hinged on the infinitesimal. It takes us from the bloody religious strife of the sixteenth century to the battlefields of the English civil war and the fierce confrontations between leading thinkers like Galileo and Hobbes.
Amir Alexanders Infinitesimal is the story of the struggle that pitted Europes entrenched powers against voices for tolerance and change. With the stroke of a pen they set off a war for the soul of the modern world.
The doctrine would become the foundation of calculus, but on that fateful day the judges ruled that it was forbidden. The epic battle over a mathematical concept that shook the old order and shaped the world as we know it On August 10, 1632, five leaders of the Society of Jesus convened in a somber Roman palazzo to pass judgment on a simple idea: that a continuous line is composed of distinct and limitlessly tiny parts.
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