★★★★★ One of the best biographies I've ever read

Alexander Hamilton

Ron Chernow

I read this book eleven years ago for a book club I belonged to at the time. This was long before Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical. It was one of the best biographies I've ever read.

Hamilton is a fascinating and mostly admirable character, who, like most of us, did some very stupid things at times. It is also interesting to see what politics was like in those times, how much has changed and how little.

I was fascinated to learn, among other things, that Hamilton put calculus on the college curriculum:

[Hamilton] was no less directive when it came to curricula, declaring that the engineering school should teach “fluxions, conic sections, hydraulics, hydrostatics, and pneumatics.”

"Fluxion" was Newton's word for what we now call a derivative in calculus classes.

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