Dr.E.T.Bell taught Mathematics at Cal Tech.  Which means he couldn’t have been a slouch, given the reputation of that institution. If you have any doubts on this, pull this book (ISBN 0-671-62818-6 PBK) off your nearest library and get started.

Don’t be intimidated by the number of pages. As the engaging Introduction puts it, you can read the chapters in isolation and in whatever order you choose. If you can get to the first line of the Introduction of course, you’ll be hooked. How can you walk away from a writer who starts his book with the lines “This section is headed Introduction rather than the Preface (which it really is) in the hope of decoying habitual preface-skippers into reading (it)“?

If Dr.Bell’s lectures were anything like his writing, they must have been a blast. He knows his stuff well enough to refrain from trying to impress the reader with arcane symbols and explanations.  His love for the subject, his admiration of the efforts of the mathematicians, and  his irreverence for icons makes the book readable even if you don’t like mathematics. Commenting on the story that psephologists,  having exhumed Leibniz’ skull, found it smaller than normal, he says “There may be something in this, as many of us have seen perfect idiots with noble brows bulging from heads as big as broth pots“.

His descriptions of Newton, Leibniz, Euler and Lagrange alone make the book worth reading for anyone interested in mechanics. The chapters provide a wonderful insight into how the continuous and discrete forms of mathematics have pushed and shoved for the attention of scientists. This is particularly relevant to today’s world of FEM, where stochastic methods are beginning to make dents into what was firmly the world of differential calculus.

The chapter on the Bernoulli family seems, by contrast, a hindsight. Whether the brevity was because of an in ability to squeeze the achievements of this remarkable family into a few pages, or for other reasons, this narrative is colorless by comparison to the others.

To get the most out of this book, however, you should treat it as more than just a series of engaging pencil sketches. Read the descriptions of the science with care, because they provide a tremendously useful insight into why the mathematicians labored on the subjects they chose, and why these are relevant to our engineering pursuits of today. You will not only find equations, proofs, and corollaries easier to follow, you will also start to understand why they are important.