If calculus did not exist, mathematicians would be unable to describe a motorcycle’s acceleration, gravity’s influence on thrown balls and faraway planets, or demonstrate that a person could walk across a room and finally touch the wall on the other side of room. This brilliant book, written by an author with amazing lucidity and stylistic brio, investigates the question of how calculus makes these things conceivable and, in the process, discovers a correlation between real numbers and the real world. The book is a tour de force. At the same time that he is introducing us to the mysteries of real numbers, functions, and limits, Berlinski investigates the most far-reaching consequences of his topic. He shows how calculus can reconcile the exactness of numbers with the fluidity of a universe that is always changing.
