This is a quite phenomenal tour de force by a talented and enthusiastic mathematician keen to break down the mystique and barriers to the subject. He does do spectacularly well: this little volume covers an amazing amount of ground, from simple measurement concepts and problem-solving all the way up to the ideas that underlie some of the most modern pieces of mathematics like differential forms and the calculus of variations. On the way everyone will learn something they didn’t know, in my case the relationship between natural logarithms and conic sections.

5/5. Finished Monday 5 August, 2013.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)