by

Silvanus P. Thompson

What one fool can do, another can.

(Ancient Simian Proverb.)

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• I. To Deliver You From The Preliminary Terrors
• II. On Different Degrees of Smallness
• III. On Relative Growings
• IV. Simplest Cases
• V. Next Stage. What to do with Constants
• VI. Sums, Differences, Products and Quotients
• VII. Successive Differentiation
• VIII. When Time Varies
• IX. Introducing a Useful Dodge
• X. Geometrical Meaning of Differentiation
• XI Maxima and Minima
• XII. Curvature of Curves
• XIII. Other Useful Dodges
• XIV. (a) On true Compound Interest and the Law of Organic Growth
• XIV. (b) The Die-away Curve
• XV. How To Deal With Sines And Cosines
• XVI. Partial Differentiation
• XVII. Integration
• XVIII. Integrating as the Reverse of Differentiating
• XIX. On Finding Areas by Integrating
• XX. Dodges, Pitfalls, and Triumphs
• XXI. Finding some Solutions
• Epilogue and Apologue
• Table of Standard Forms

About this book

Calculus Made Easy is a book on calculus originally published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject.

I read "Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus P. Thompson and it’s still to this day my inspiration for explaining complex technical topics to lay people. It’s a fantastic book, and even if you know math you must read it if you want to understand how to teach complexity to others. (source)

Thompson creates a warm, inviting environment where students will learn and grasp the true essence of calculus without any added fluff or overt technicality. (source)

Most college calculus texts weigh a ton; this one does not — it just gets to the point. This is how I learned calculus: my uncle gave me a copy. (source)

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What next?

• I have enjoyed Calculus, Second edition by Gilbert Strang. It is similar to Calculus Made Easy but is more advanced.

• Visual Complex Analysis is legendary. Just as Calculus Made Easy, it uses a geometrical approach instead of the usual symbolic one.

• Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos is another more advanced textbook that is famous for its great pedagogy. You can also find Strogatz’s lectures on youtube.

About this edition & thanks

This text is based on the PDF version from Project Gutenberg converted to html by hand.

Thanks to Paula Appling, Don Bindner, Chris Curnow, Andrew D. Hwang and Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team for preparing the original PDF.

The theme is borrowed from Dive Into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim released under the CC-BY-3.0 license.

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