It began with Babbage: the genesis of computer science, by Subrata Dasgupta

Abstract

will ‘show that some fairly esoteric Renaissance ideas nourished the seventeenth century climate that made Leibniz’s calculus possible’ (p 205). On the whole, this volume is a useful contribution to a large and growing literature. Readers not readily familiar with the contents of a university-level course in the calculus may find some of the material technically challenging, and those with reservations about the Kuhnian analysis of scientific change will likely find the historiographic orientation unsatisfying. I also found that Brown’s discussion tended to wander rather far afield—an impression heightened by the presence of six appendices that range over topics only very loosely connected to Brown’s main argument. Finally, the presence of numerous typographical errors through the text was occasionally distracting. Despite these shortcomings, the volume delivers a nuanced and technically sound account of the Leibnizian calculus and its intellectual context.