Isaac Newton (left) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz each independently invented calculus.Credit: Left, DeAgostini/Getty; Right, Lombard/ullstein bild via Getty Midway through Infinite Powers, Steven Strogatz writes that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both "died in excruciating pain while suffering from calculi -- a bladder stone for Newton, a kidney stone for Leibniz". It was a cruelly ironic end for the scientists who independently invented calculus: the word comes from the Latin for'small stone', in reference to pebbles once used for counting. Such fascinating anecdotes abound in Infinite Powers. Strogatz, a mathematician working in nonlinear dynamics and complex systems, has written a romp through the history of calculus -- the study of how things change. Starting with the ancient Greeks, the book ends with connections between the field and artificial intelligence and machine learning. Calculus was key to working with Newton's laws of motion, which stimulated the Industrial Revolution.