A Tour of the Calculus
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Narrated by:
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Dennis Holland
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By:
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David Berlinski
About this listen
Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio. Even as he initiates us into the mysteries of real numbers, functions, and limits, Berlinski explores the furthest implications of his subject, revealing how the calculus reconciles the precision of numbers with the fluidity of the changing universe.
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James Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks.
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Fiction gives us Truth by connecting the dots
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The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with natures most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.
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Calculus Ergo Modernity
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Isaac Newton
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James Gleick has long been fascinated by the making of science: how ideas order visible appearances, how equations can give meaning to molecular and stellar phenomena, how theories can transform what we see. In Chaos, he chronicled the emergence of a new way of looking at dynamic systems; in Genius, he portrayed the wondrous dimensions of Richard Feymnan's mind.
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BRUTAL
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In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history. The Invention of Science goes back 500 years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently.
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A Good Read Spoiled
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Bestselling author Leonard Shlain explores the life, art, and mind of Leonardo da Vinci, seeking to explain his singularity by looking at his achievements in art, science, psychology, and military strategy (yes), and then employing state of the art left-right brain scientific research to explain his universal genius. Shlain shows that no other person in human history has excelled in so many different areas as Da Vinci and he peels back the layers to explore the how and the why.
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As distracted as Da Vinci
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A brilliantly original and richly illuminating exploration of entanglement, the seemingly telepathic communication between two separated particles - one of the fundamental concepts of quantum physics.
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Quite nice
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Author Jim Holt explores the greatest metaphysical mystery of all: why is there something rather than nothing? This runaway best seller, which has captured the imagination of critics and the public alike, traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. Holt adopts the role of cosmological detective, traveling the globe to interview a host of celebrated scientists, philosophers, and writers.
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Fatal Reader Flaw
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Spooky Action at a Distance
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What is space? It isn't a question that most of us normally stop to ask. Space is the venue of physics; it's where things exist, where they move and take shape. Yet over the past few decades, physicists have discovered a phenomenon that operates outside the confines of space and time. The phenomenon - the ability of one particle to affect another instantly across the vastness of space - appears to be almost magical.
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Rambling but Asks Good Questions
- By Michael on 12-19-15
By: George Musser
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What listeners say about A Tour of the Calculus
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kiaf
- 10-18-24
Becoming Calculus
Excellent narration. As a non mathematician nor graduate, I appreciated the historical follow through of all that would contribute and shape directly or indirectly todays calculus.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-20-19
A Tour of The Calculus
Excellent book! Full of insight and knowledge! A great way to get introduced to calculus!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Etoile NEOhio
- 04-16-20
Calc explained for the rest of us!
As a college freshman I was advised not to take any college level mathematics because my math entry scores were so bad. I heeded the advice and took my natural science requirements in astronomy and geology. For 40 years I believed I did not understand mathematics until I heard David Berlinski on NPR and thought I might give this book a try.
In spite of my family telling me that I use things like algebra every day when I cook or crochet, it was hard to believe that I could understand complicated concepts of mathematics. Having completed this book I am proud to say I understood most of it, although I could not repeat it, and I'm thrilled to be able to participate in conversations were terms like derivative and functions are peppered through.
I look forward to the next book in the series with great anticipation. Thank you so much for making the calculus come to life for someone who does not consider themselves logical or mathematical but rather verbal and spatial.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tate
- 05-22-17
Good, but not great for listening
The book was enjoyable, but I listened while also reading a paperback. There are some common mispronunciations that confused me even with the text in front of me. Subscripts were confused with exponents frequently. I really enjoyed the book, but I'm not sure how one would have grasped some of the functions without seeing them.
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11 people found this helpful
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- ridgeway137
- 01-05-20
Absolutely fantastic for a math lover - The best really for listening
As a person naturally interested in mathematics this audio book is excellent. If you want an audio book that helps you to review calculus or to go along with learning calculus from a text you will not do any better than this audio. Of course if you are having a hard time learning calculus, listen to this book over and over. As someone who knows “the Calculus” well since I got my Bachelor of Science in math, I think this is a better tour than I realized could even be done in an audio form.
Calculus may appear boring at first before you understand it, but it becomes so beautiful and so useful to understanding science once you do.
I plan to listen to this over and over just to help me explain calculus better to others.
Also I read so some of the other less glowing reviews and obviously I disagree and only can say that it is true that the author is definitely verbose and is maybe a little bit of overly descriptive in some places, it is still simply an excellent alternative source for anyone studying calculus and also trying to work some problems. Great job I say to David Berlinski. I am in disbelief at some of the negative reviews I read after first posting my review so I added this last paragraph to counter the more critical reviews. It is so much easier to destroy than create.
Maybe people that don't understand it would have to listen more that once but I will listen more times just because it is so well done.
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4 people found this helpful
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- GH0
- 09-06-19
A Great topic, a convoluted way of delivery
The author provided, in twists and turns, a neopolitan Sunday if fascinating history, mathematical fluency, and self indulgent prose.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Pete K
- 01-27-23
Frustratingly Bad Writing
Every other sentence, the whole book through, is an imaginary culture reference - or, failing that, an unnecessary anthropomorphism.
These are not clever or humorous allusions to real persons or places or ideas, but vague “discussions in a smoky room, with roasted plums and the scratches of Clementi on impossibly nostalgic vinyl.” A few of these would be tolerable, but on every page, you must wade through them. They serve only to distract from every point, not elucidate it.
Go elsewhere for an interesting introduction to calculus. Come here if you enjoy filling your time with contrivances.
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- Nelson Alexander
- 05-14-14
A Tour of Incalculable Verbosity
I am about ten minutes into this, skipping ahead, and giving up for now, quite exasperated. I had hoped for a good overview and cultural description of calculus. This work is so wittily overwritten, so full of long, fanciful descriptions and soaring metaphor it is nearly impossible to remember what on earth we are talking about. The writing is actually good, but seems to have leapt the fence out its genre, striving to be Nabokov with little regard for the listener who just wants a bit of lucid mathematical explanation. I may try again later, but post this warning: you'll have to shovel aside heaps of colorful "prose" to get to anything about calculus.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Sam Park
- 02-08-19
Way to much superfluous language. Good god man just say what you mean!
Way too many cryptic analogies and poetic language. It’s math, be concise. The book could be condensed by 2/3...
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- Kindle Customer
- 05-27-14
Top Poet among Mathemeticians
First of all: As long as this book says it is narrated by Dennis Holland, don't waste your money or credit.The narrator has NO concept of how to read mathematical formulae, and, thus, the book was confusing at best. It took me a few instances where the narrator spoke of "two-x" to realize that he should be reading it as "x-squared" or "x to the second power". I find it hard to believe that an author would allow a narrator to so completely destroy his text; I further find it hard to believe that anyone educated would fail to understand the difference between 2x and x-squared. Come on, guys. It's an audiobook - the spoken language is all we have here. It needs to be precise, particularly in mathematics. I stopped listening out of frustration after only a couple of hours.
As for the book, the language is quite flowery. Perhaps if I could have persisted in listening to the book further, the language would have grown on me, but, alas, it just seems to be too much window-dressing for the subject. The analogies did not illumine the primary subject, but seemed stretched to give the illusion of literary skill.
I had high hopes for an interesting history of the calculus, but found only frustration.
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