Is this a novel? Or a biography? Graeme Cohen is so close to his true life subject, that imagined events and conversations seem exactly real. Martin Gardiner, colonial Australia’s most published mathematician, was better at attracting supporters and women than at caring for them, or protecting himself. Cohen’s warts and all story is true to ......
Join sensational drag queen Kyne Santos on an extraordinary journey through the glamorous world of... math?
This sassy book is your VIP pass, taking you behind the scenes with a TikTok superstar who shatters stereotypes and proves that math can be fascinating and fun, even ......
Mathematics today is the fruit of centuries of brilliant insights by men and women whose personalities and life experiences were often as extraordinary as their mathematical achievements. This entertaining history of mathematics chronicles those achievements through fifty short biographies that bring these great thinkers to life while making their ......
Numerals and Their Peculiarities in Mathematics and Beyond
We see numbers on automobile license plates, addresses, weather reports, and, of course, on our smartphones. Yet we look at these numbers for their role as descriptors, not as an entity in and unto themselves. Each number has its own history of meaning, usage, and connotation in the larger world. The Secret Lives of Numbers takes readers on a ......
We all learned that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is called pi and that the value of this algebraic symbol is roughly 3.14. What we weren't told, though, is that behind this seemingly mundane fact is a world of mystery, which has fascinated mathematicians from ancient times to the present. Simply put, pi is weird. ......
We measure historyits defining moments, landmark documents, and great figuresby dates. The French Revolution began in 1789, the Magna Carta was originally issued in 1215, and Julius Caesar died in the year 44 BC. What makes these dates correct, though? Is it possible that there is a massive gap in the historical record and that the calendar ......
Discussing ancient mathematics, this work digs deeper into the question of why it was done in a particular way. Why did the Egyptians use a bizarre method of expressing fractions? Why did Babylonians use an awkward number system based on multiples of 60? It answers such questions, arguing that some mathematical thinking is universal and timeless.
Accounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), who collaborated with the Italian Jesuit Matteo ......
The shape of the Earth was a significant scientific question in the eighteenth century. When it was discovered that the Earth was flattened at the poles, scientists sought to understand the cause, leading to the study of the gravitational attraction of celestial spheroids. The solution drew upon Newton's law of universal gravitation, which used ......
