Silvanus P. Thompson, born in 1851, was elected to the Royal Society in 1891. He wrote numerous technical books and manuals on electricity, magnetism, dynamos, and optics, as well as several popular biographies of prominent scientists. Thompson died in 1916.

Martin Gardner, born in 1914, has written several reviews for The New York Review of Books and was a Scientific American columnist for over twenty-five years. He lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

"Calculus Made Easy is arguably the best math teaching ever. To a non-mathematician, its simplicity and clarity reveals the mathematical genius of Newton, Leibniz, and Thompson himself. Martin Gardner deserves huge thanks for renewing this great book." --Julian Simon, author of Population Matters

"A remarkable and user-friendly approach to the study of calculus, made even more so by Martin Gardner, the most highly acclaimed mathematical expositor of our time." --R.L. Graham, Chief Scientist, AT&T Labs, and author of Concrete Mathematics