Author: Richard Courant
I don’t know that I would call this book an “elementary” approach by most of our definition of the word. But I do sometimes get the sense that we’ve dumbed down our education so much that perhaps this was elementary to people 80 years ago.
I found this book by looking up a list of books that Carl Sagan recommends reading, which I was inspired to do after reading Cosmos. I was hoping it’d be a bit more of a history of mathematics and just how important / influential the things we learned in school but didn’t appreciate were, such as the Pythagoras theorem.
The book definitely covered Pythagoras, among other topics we’ve all heard of but didn’t internalize. Integers, prime numbers, geometry, algebra, limits and continuity, maxima and minima, Calculus, The integral, etc. Each chapter or section would start out relatively simply, explaining some of the early thinking on the subject, but then it would very rapidly turn into what just looked like a math textbook. This was more of a skim read than a read-every-line kind of book. I am somewhat ashamed at the amount of mathematics I’ve retained and would like to go back and re-learn and dig deeper into a few subjects. However I am currently learning and writing about the bulk of the entire history of Europe, so this will have to be for another day.