Title: Nobody's perfect
Review: I recommend this book to anyone who has learned calculus. The book is full of mathematical gems set in historical context. For example, one of the Bernoullis showed that the integral of 1/x^x from x=0 to 1 is the sum of 1/n^n from n=1 to infinity. If you appreciate that result, then this book is for you. I have found only one error in the first 45 pages (which is as far as I have read). On page 13 the author is trying to compute the average distance of a planet from the sun, assuming an elliptical trajectory, and tacitly assuming a uniform distribution in the angle that astronomers call true anomaly. For this distribution, despite the assertion at the top of page 13, it is easy to show that if the ellipse is not a circle, then the average distance from the sun is less than the semimajor axis of the ellipse. So the author is human after all.
Is this product review negative?