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I am looking for the author and title of a book I used to own. I am not looking for recommendations. I am trying to identify one particular book.

It contains some topics in calculus at the advanced high school or undergraduate level which are not usually covered in the syllabus. A fair bit of it is about polynomials. It is mostly for entertainment and is written in quite a relaxed style.

Some of the topics covered are: the Lambert W function, palindromes, and (I think) the Newton Polytope. I can't remember any others. I have tried searching for these topics but am not getting any hits.

It was a fairly thin hardback, very probably published by Springer between 2000 and 2015. I think it has a single author and the author was an American.

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Found it! Uncommon Mathematical Excursions: Polynomia and Related Realms by Dan Kalman. It was published by AMS and not Springer.

https://bookstore.ams.org/dol-35/

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    $\begingroup$ Just saw your question. Curiously, Kalman's book did NOT cross my mind despite my citing Kalman's book yesterday in a comment to this question (and I'm mentioned in Kalman's Acknowledgments). Instead, what crossed my mind was Excursions in Calculus. An Interplay of the Continuous and the Discrete by Robert Michael Young (1992). By the way, I don't know what's up with the amazon.com price of \$381.40, but it's \$59.00 from AMS | MAAPress (\$44.25 for members). $\endgroup$
    – Dave L. Renfro
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 6:25
  • $\begingroup$ It's possible the AMS | MAAPress price is only for the electronic version (and I can't find the print version available at the MAA or AMS web pages), which is rather strange because I thought the book was rather well known and thus the print version would be selling reasonably well (as such books go, at least). I had no trouble getting a (new) print version for around \$25 or \$30, but this was in the early 2000s. I wonder if certain books that used to be easily available (e.g. MAA's several book series) in print are starting to become difficult to get due to no longer being printed? $\endgroup$
    – Dave L. Renfro
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 6:33

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