Hermann Weyl (1885-1955) was one of the twentieth century's most important mathematicians, as well as a seminal figure in the development of quantum physics and general relativity.
On October 23, 1852, Professor Augustus De Morgan wrote a letter to a colleague, unaware that he was launching one of the most famous mathematical conundrums in history--one that would confound thousands of puzzlers for more than a century.
This publication, now in its second edition, includes an unabridged and annotated translation of two works by Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777) written in the 1760s: Vorlaufige Kenntnisse fur die, so die Quadratur und Rectification des Circuls suchen and Memoire sur quelques proprietes remarquables des quantites transcendentes circulaires et logarithmiques.
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 forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena.
Jamshid al-Kashi's Miftah al-Hisab (Key to Arithmetic) was largely unknown to researchers until the mid-20th century, and has not been translated to English until now.
A survey of ancient Egyptian mathematics across three thousand yearsMathematics in Ancient Egypt traces the development of Egyptian mathematics, from the end of the fourth millennium BC-and the earliest hints of writing and number notation-to the end of the pharaonic period in Greco-Roman times.
An acclaimed biography of the Enlightenment's greatest mathematicianThis is the first full-scale biography of Leonhard Euler (1707-83), one of the greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists of all time.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira KnightleyIt is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (19121954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decadesall before his suicide at age forty-one.
The most comprehensive account of the mathematician's life and workJohn Napier (1550-1617) is celebrated today as the man who invented logarithms-an enormous intellectual achievement that would soon lead to the development of their mechanical equivalent in the slide rule: the two would serve humanity as the principal means of calculation until the mid-1970s.
An entertaining and informative anthology of popular math writing from the Renaissance to cyberspaceDespite what we may sometimes imagine, popular mathematics writing didn't begin with Martin Gardner.
A lively history of the peculiar math of votingSince the very birth of democracy in ancient Greece, the simple act of voting has given rise to mathematical paradoxes that have puzzled some of the greatest philosophers, statesmen, and mathematicians.
The Handbook Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences addresses numerous issues in the emerging field of the philosophy of those sciences that are involved in the technological process of designing, developing and making of new technical artifacts and systems.
The epoch-making work of Janos Bolyai is presented here, together with a supplement outlining Hungarian political and science history to help the reader to get acquainted with the miserable fate of Janos Bolyai and with his intellectual world.
History of Functional Analysis presents functional analysis as a rather complex blend of algebra and topology, with its evolution influenced by the development of these two branches of mathematics.
This book offers a historical explanation of important philosophical problems in logic and mathematics, which have been neglected by the official history of modern logic.
This revealing work examines an approach from ancient astronomy to what was then a particularly important question, namely that of understanding the relationship between the position in the ecliptic and the time it takes for a fixed-length of the ecliptic beginning at that point to rise above the eastern horizon.
While it is well known that the Delian problems are impossible to solve with a straightedge and compass - for example, it is impossible to construct a segment whose length is cube root of 2 with these instruments - the discovery of the Italian mathematician Margherita Beloch Piazzolla in 1934 that one can in fact construct a segment of length cube root of 2 with a single paper fold was completely ignored (till the end of the 1980s).
This is a volume of chapters on the historical study of information, computing, and society written by seven of the most senior, distinguished members of the History of Computing field.
This volume is the product of the Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and contains the text of most of the invited lectures.
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.
A revisionist, completely accessible and radically inclusive history of maths'Lively, satisfying, good at explaining difficult concepts' The Sunday TimesMathematics shapes almost everything we do.
To many outsiders, mathematicians appear to think like computers, grimly grinding away with a strict formal logic and moving methodically--even algorithmically--from one black-and-white deduction to another.
A breathtakingly illustrated look at botanical spirals and the scientists who puzzled over themCharles Darwin was driven to distraction by plant spirals, growing so exasperated that he once begged a friend to explain the mystery ';if you wish to save me from a miserable death.
