calculus [09/30/2006 12:23:42]

I went to bed early last night in order to make the ride this morning, but I'm still coughing and sneezing. I'm going to do some kind of cardio today, but I didn't have it in me to ride 45 miles this morning.

So instead I answered a few emails and finished reading David Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus. I've finished a couple books off the stack while I've been sick this week, but this one really stands out. It's one of the best books I've read in a long time.

Berlinski's writing is heavy on imagery and narrative. If it were a novel, I'd say he was overly verbose, but with math as the subject, the style works. All the digressions and flowery prose give you time to digest the bits and pieces of theory, so the net effect is he makes it all sound easy.

I had to talk myself out of writing a calculus application. I think that would be an awesome project to do in lisp or scheme - representing functions as expression trees and using rewrite rules to calculate their derivatives and integrals... Then you could plot the functions in a graph or compile them down to MathML or even C source code.

But that's just another example of me having way too many ideas for projects, so I quickly came to my senses. Good book though. :)