Product Description: This book is a study of how a particular vision of the unity of mathematics, often called geometric function theory, was created in the 19th century. The central focus is on the convergence of three mathematical topics: the hypergeometric and related linear differential equations, group theory, and on-Euclidean geometry...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In this book, Hans Wussing sets out to trace the process of abstraction that led finally to the axiomatic formulation of the abstract notion of group. His main thesis is that the roots of the abstract notion of group do not lie, as frequently assumed, only in the theory of algebraic equations; they are also to be found in the geometry and the theory of numbers of the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries. The book takes us from Lagrange via Cauchy, Abel, and Galois to Serret and Camille Jordan. It then turns to Cayley, to Felix Klein's Erlangen Program, and to Sophus Lie, and ends with a sketch of the state of group theory about 1920, when the axiom systems of Webber had been formalized and investigated in their own right.

Traces the four-thousand-year-old mathematical effort to discover and define the laws of symmetry in nature and the arts, citing the achievements of doomed geniuses Niels Henrick Abel and Evariste Galois to solve the quintic equation and give birth to group theory. By the author of The Golden Ratio. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.