Customer Reviews

The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Americans don't get a very good education in math and science. While never great, it's plummeted over the last three decades. Many Americans--even those who are highly-educated in other areas--appear to take pride in this ignorance.

To her great credit, Jennifer Ouellette is having none of it. She has been making a career of filling the gaps, first in physics and now in mathematics. You don't have to be a professional mathematician to find that math enriches your view of the world. It's not always the conventional route that brings you that understanding, but good coaches and a bit of elbow grease will get you there. I have heard Ouellette interviewed on radio and podcasts and she seems to have the perfect personality to share this with a large audience.

I was disappointed to find that this book falls short of what it could have been. It starts out with great promise, setting a historical context with Archimedes and later figures. We soon move into a trip to Las Vegas. Ouellette lays out a number of interesting problems to consider, beginning with the speed and distance of the drive. After only the tiniest bit of math--all expressed verbally--we're on to the dice table and a discussion of probabilities. Maybe we'll have a little more math here, but were soon on to something else. There are always comments about how calculus could help to understand a problem, but there's no follow-through. This is a pattern that is repeated throughout the book. The section on zombies passes quickly through Jane Austin, parasitic fungus in ants and Malthusian population growth. The book becomes very much like a disjointed version of James Burke's "Connections" series from the 1970s. At each stop along the way, we're told that a derivative or an integration would be useful, but we don't see the math. As generations of teachers have said, "show your work".

I think that Ouellette needed to show more trust in her readers. The fact that the word "Calculus" is in the book title means that the audience will be self-selecting. If you don't know calculus or aren't interested in learning, you're not going to bother with this book. I don't think that mentions of zombies or weight loss will get past the simple terror that the word "calculus" unfairly strikes in the innumerate heart. She adopted a policy of not showing any equations until the final few pages of appendix. What better time than during the discussion of the problem? Ouellette is the perfect person for the job. She has an approachable readable style and a gentle self-deprecating wit. I think that the majority of her readers would stick with her as she walked through the techniques.

I hope I've misjudged the book and that the problems I perceive are not shared by other readers. We need to get smarter and I appreciate Ouellette's effort, even if I feel it didn't fully succeed.

First year college calculus was where I hit the wall, math-wise. I thought I was hot stuff because I'd breezed through algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and precalculus. I loved computer science, or what passed for computer science in the 1970s. I planned to major in math at university. So failing first year calculus was a shock to my ego and to my plans for the future.

Jennifer Oullette's book seemed like a chance to try again after all these years. No pressure, nothing to prove, just a chance to approach calculus again for the fun of it. She's a science-oriented journalist, so making complicated things clear is her job. She claims to have been wary of calculus herself, until she tackled it head on by taking a video course and getting help from her physicist husband.

The examples Oullette used resonated with me. Now I was going to learn that calculus is not only manageable, but relevant to my life. Her examples -- the drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, the Tower of Terror at Disneyland, the casinos of Las Vegas, the hunt for a house, the progress of Black Death and other plagues, the Barcelona architecture of Gaudí -- were topics I knew something about. All I needed to do was add a little calculus.

Sadly, once again I failed to fall in love with calculus. After the first few examples, I found myself protesting, "But you can use other kinds of math, simpler kinds of math to do these problems!" Sure, I realize that engineers and physicists need calculus to figure out exactly how much concrete to use or to plot the path of a planet. But will knowing calculus help me enjoy the rides at Disneyland more? Or decide which house to buy? Maybe I will have to learn to accept calculus for itself, rather than for its practical uses.

Calculus seems less intimidating to me now, so the book has succeeded at chipping away at a decades-old wall. Even though I had limited success with calculus itself, I did enjoy reading the book. I think that next time I want to tackle calculus I'll use the course Oullette mentions - The Teaching Company's Calculus Made Clear with Professor Michael Starbird. (If you order it from The Teaching Company before October 4, 2010 using code 44134, you can get the course at an incredible discount.)

The Calculus Diaries, by Jennifer Oullette, is kind of a `physics for poets' take on higher mathematics. Rather than confuse her math-phobic readers with tortuous equations and cryptic mathematical symbols, Oulette tries to help us understand the germ of the mathematical idea. She outlines the basic concepts and explains how calculus might be as elegant as a sonnet or jaunty villanelle. As ridiculous as this may sound, Oulette can really pull this off. After reading this book you may not become a mathematical genius but you will gain a deeper understanding of calculus' basic principles and an appreciation for how calculus stunningly describes the real world.

[A warning to science and math majors everywhere: this is a very basic book and it is not meant to supplement a lifelong study of calculus. The book helps the more mathphobic among us understand these elementary concepts. If you already understand these concepts this book will be far too basic for you.]

Oulette's approach is simple. First, she delves into a bit of interesting history for one of her topics. This serves to warm up her humanities-minded readers, giving them a sense of security with something that they can easily understand. She then segues into a real world problem--a road trip, an amusement park ride, casino games, or an epidemic--and, using concepts of limits, derivatives, and integrals, describes how calculus really helps you understand the world around you.

On the whole, she is successful at clearly explaining the broad concepts and is able to do this in an engaging and interesting way. You will leave the book with a much greater appreciation of mathematics and how calculus really does describe. It may even pique your interest enough to dig that Calc I textbook out of the basement, where it has sat for 20 years propping up your lopsided washing machine. (You may end up putting it right back, but you might thumb through a few pages first.)

Unfortunately, the book will not perform miracles and will not turn you into a mathematician over night. It also helps if you already had a rudimentary understanding of some of these concepts before picking up the book. Still, what makes this book worth the read are those `Aha!' moments that you will get when Oulette explains a concept and it just clicks. She really does have a way of distilling the major ideas down to their bare bones and building them up slowly, in a non-intimidating kind of way.

Sadly humbling, however, are the `optional' appendices at the end of the book, where Oulette tries to strengthen the concepts by getting into some of those messy equations. Appendix I wasn't completely nasty or bruitish, but was thankfully short. In all fairness, the author does recommended `The Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus' by W. Michael Kelly to help with a more in depth look at calculus. Even so, there is a little too much/too fast here. Even if you thoroughly understood the rest of the book, some of the material in the appendices might whiz right over your head. Not to worry. It happened to me too.

On the whole, this was a very rewarding read. Highly recommended.

As a math teacher, I was looking forward to some additional insights and examples that I could use in my teaching. I also read the book from the perspective of how a non-math professional might relate to the material.

I found the book to be confusing and containing errors. As a math teacher, I did not find the book useful at all. If I were reading as a person trying to gain access to mathematical ideas without increasing my math anxiety, I thought that the book failed in its attempt: the content was often convoluted, difficult to follow and full of generalizations.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I did not enjoy the book nor did I find it useful.

I thought that "Calculus Diaries" contained a good description of calculus
for people who did not know what calculus is, however, the sub-title of the
book implied that it would contain information on how one could use calculus to
solve problems in one's everyday life and it did not do that.

***
I read this book hoping to finally understand what calculus was and what it was used for. I had been a mathematics major in college and had graduated with honors, but with apparently useless information; I knew how to get good grades but had no understanding of what to do with what knew in the real world. I found work in another field. Now, over thirty years later, I remembered little to nothing and thought that this book would be delightful.

I didn't understand all of the book, but enough to make it a worthwhile read. I especially enjoyed the historical parts and stories, much less so the actual technical and mathematical parts. I was bored to tears by anything involving physics, but this really wasn't the author's fault, as I've always been this way. Unfortunately, a lot of the book involved physics...if I'd known what calculus was before I started, I suppose I would have known that. I didn't find this book rambling at all, but right on point.

The author covers such interesting topics as: traffic-flow, gambling, amusement park physics, bungee jumping, the housing bubble, epidemics, waves, and more. Each chapter is an application of calculus and physics to real world scenarios. If this interests you, and you like like mathematics AND physics, you will enjoy this book.

Recommended.
****

This will teach you about as much math and possibly less than you learned from watching Numbers. It has some interesting bits of trivia but is neither diary enough nor calculus enough to be interesting on either front. This is an entirely self-indulgent gee look at me kind of book which an editor worth his or her salt should have stopped in its tracks. If you have already learned a little calculus then it has nothing for you. If you have not already learned calculus it doesn't have enough of an explanation even conceptually for you to follow. Sorry I bought it. IF editors are to have any role in the coming world it should be stopping this kind of book from wasting people's money, by telling authors to revise or simply refusing to print such a weak effort.

I thought I would like this book since I like books based on logic and statistics and I do want to learn/understand calculus, but it turned out to be boring and it reminded me of doing those practical math equations you had to do in school, which I always loathed, she's just trying to hide them in longer stories. I want to understand calculus, I really do, but this book is not going to do anything for me. Some people obviously love this book - I'd love to see some sort of analysis that would explain the differing reactions. Maybe I just couldn't get interested in the stories about house-hunting and whatnot. Better would be a really good sci fi novel where the main character has to figure stuff out using calculus.

The one time I perked up was when behavioral economics were mentioned - maybe I should find a book on that instead.

I was very excited about this book, wondering if perhaps I would finally "get" calculus. One reviewer points out that Ouellette does not go into many calculations in the text, and I agree that this was a negative feature of the book. However, I do appreciate Ouellette's desire not to clog up the text with too much of the equation stuff and some of it is included in an appendix. Afterall, this was not intended to be an instruction text in calculus. However, this was a book that lends itself well to diagrams and equations, and Ouellette could have included more of them, instead of a mere, "calculus can do this" approach. That being said, I enjoyed her writing style and personal anecdotes.

This book caused my fourteen year old daughter to ask me to buy her some math books. She ASKED for math books.
My first thought was that she had a table leg that needed propping up, but no, she wanted to read them, thanks to this book.
I think the zombies and the reference to "losing weight" in the title sucked her in, but the writing kept her there.
I'm ordering her a stack of books on calculus, physics, and trigonometry, at her request, this Friday.
It doesn't work on everyone, my other daughter said "Mommy, promise me you won't buy ME any math books" but that's OK. It caught one daughter's interest and sent her spinning into a new direction. My thanks to the author!
As an English major (like the author), I'm allergic to math, but even I have to admit this is an interesting book, and if I'd encountered it when I was younger, I might have balanced my education a little better. I wish I had! It has a lot of mathematical history, which I understand, as well as theories and applications, which I don't, really, but it made me want to delve and figure it out.
I'm going to borrow some of the math books my daughter is getting, and then re-read this book and see if I understand it better.
At the very least, though, I will try to treat math with more respect, and withhold my denigration of a subject I don't truly comprehend.