Living in a Vacuum

I'm reading John Gribbin's "Science: A History" and enjoying it immensely. But it is making me realise how little basic science I actually know. When I'm finished I have to go back to mathematics too. I wish I'd paid more attention to logarithms, calculus etc. back in school. To think that they could develop so much in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries while still only formulating basic mathematical syntax (the '+' and '-' symbols were apparently only introduced in 1540, though of course that's not to say Arabian mathematicians didn't have their own approaches).