Sofia Kovalevskaya was a brilliant and determined young Russian woman of the 19th century who wanted to become a mathematician and who succeeded, in often difficult circumstances, in becoming arguably the first woman to have a professional university career in the way we understand it today.
Indiscrete Thoughts gives a glimpse into a world that has seldom been described that of science and technology as seen through the eyes of a mathematician.
This book presents contributions of mathematicians covering topics from ancient India, placing them in the broader context of the history of mathematics.
by Ivor Grattan-Guinness One of the distortions in most kinds of history is an imbalance between the study devoted to major figures and to lesser ones, concerning both achievements and influence: the Great Ones may be studied to death while the others are overly ignored and thereby remain underrated.
The Italian mathematician Mario Pieri (1860-1913) played a major role in the development of algebraic geometry and foundations of mathematics around the turn of the twentieth century.
This book traces the history of approximation theory from Leonhard Euler's cartographic investigations at the end of the 18th century to the early 20th century work of Sergei Bernstein defining a new branch of function theory.
In A Total Science, Jean-Guy Prevost charts how Italian statistics emerged as a full-fledged discipline, giving rise to a network of university chairs, journals, and other institutions.
This lively collection of lectures presented at the symposium by prominent scholars was collected and edited by Marcia Stayer with the assistance of Boris Castel.
How playwrights from Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett to Tom Stoppard and Simon McBurney brought the power of mathematics to life on the stageThe discovery of alternate geometries, paradoxes of the infinite, incompleteness, and chaos theory revealed that, despite its reputation for certainty, mathematical truth is not immutable, perfect, or even perfectible.
A book that finally demystifies Newton's experiments in alchemyWhen Isaac Newton's alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts were shocking.
A meticulously researched history on the development of American mathematics in the three decades following World War IAs the Roaring Twenties lurched into the Great Depression, to be followed by the scourge of Nazi Germany and World War II, American mathematicians pursued their research, positioned themselves collectively within American science, and rose to global mathematical hegemony.
An engrossing look at the history and importance of a centuries-old but still unanswered math problemFor centuries, mathematicians the world over have tried, and failed, to solve the zeta-3 problem.
Fifty years ago when Jacques Hadamard set out to explore how mathematicians invent new ideas, he considered the creative experiences of some of the greatest thinkers of his generation, such as George Polya, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Albert Einstein.
An essential work on the origins of statisticsThe Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 explores the history of statistics from the field's origins in the nineteenth century through to the factors that produced the burst of modern statistical innovation in the early twentieth century.
How a simple equation reshaped mathematicsLeonhard Euler's polyhedron formula describes the structure of many objects-from soccer balls and gemstones to Buckminster Fuller's buildings and giant all-carbon molecules.
The genesis of the digital idea and why it transformed civilizationA few short decades ago, we were informed by the smooth signals of analog television and radio; we communicated using our analog telephones; and we even computed with analog computers.
A stimulating intellectual history of Ptolemy's philosophy and his conception of a world in which mathematics reigns supremeThe Greco-Roman mathematician Claudius Ptolemy is one of the most significant figures in the history of science.
A book that finally demystifies Newton's experiments in alchemyWhen Isaac Newton's alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts were shocking.
A stimulating intellectual history of Ptolemy's philosophy and his conception of a world in which mathematics reigns supremeThe Greco-Roman mathematician Claudius Ptolemy is one of the most significant figures in the history of science.
In his monumental 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as thePrincipia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science.
