“A thought-provoking critique of Einstein’s tantalizing combination of brilliance and blunder.”—Andrew Robinson, New ScientistNever before translated into English, the Manimekhalai is one of the great classics of Indian culture.

The third edition of this classic textbook is a quantitative introduction for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. It gently guides students from Newton's gravitational theory to special relativity, and then to the relativistic theory of gravitation. General relativity is approached from several perspectives: as a theory constructed by analogy with Maxwell's electrodynamics, as a relativistic generalization of Newton's theory, and as a theory of curved spacetime. The authors prov...