Product Description: Where and how do we, as a culture, get our ideas about mathematics and about who can engage with mathematical knowledge? Sara N. Hottinger uses a cultural studies approach to address how our ideas about mathematics shape our individual and cultural relationship to the field...read more

Product Description: Posing the question "What exactly is a number?" a distinguished German mathematician presents this intriguing and accessible survey. Albrecht Beutelspacher ― founder of the renowned interactive mathematics museum, Mathematikum ― characterizes the wealth of experiences that numbers have to offer...read more

Product Description: Computation is revolutionizing our world, even the inner world of the "pure" mathematician. Mathematical methods - especially the notion of proof - that have their roots in classical antiquity have seen a radical transformation since the 1970s, as successive advances have challenged the priority of reason over computation...read more

Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta investigates the murder of a reclusive author and discovers that being a coroner is much more than laboratory work as she becomes involved in a dangerous criminal investigation

Essays discuss Beckett's background and personality, examine his major works, and interpret the themes of his plays

Product Description: Throughout the book, readers take a journey throughout time and observe how people around the world have understood these patterns of quantity, structure, and dimension around them. The Development of Mathematics Throughout the Centuries: A Brief History in a Cultural Contex provides a brief overview of the history of mathematics in a very straightforward and understandable manner and also addresses major findings that influenced the development of mathematics as a coherent discipline...read more

Product Description: Richard Elwes is a writer, teacher and researcher in Mathematics, visiting fellow at the University of Leeds, and contributor to numerous popular science magazines. He is a committed and recognized popularizer of mathematics. Of Elwes, Sonder Books 2011 Standouts said, “Dr...read more

Product Description: A History of Mathematics covers the evolution of mathematics through time and across the major Eastern and Western civilizations. It begins in Babylon, then describes the trials and tribulations of the Greek mathematicians. The important, and often neglected, influence of both Chinese and Islamic mathematics is covered in detail, placing the description of early Western mathematics in a global context...read more

Product Description: Praise for the Second Edition "An amazing assemblage of worldwide contributions in mathematics and, in addition to use as a course book, a valuable resource . . . essential." —CHOICE This Third Edition of The History of Mathematics examines the elementary arithmetic, geometry, and algebra of numerous cultures, tracing their usage from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, China, and Japan all the way to Europe during the Medieval and Renaissance periods where calculus was developed...read more

In this follow-up to his popular Science Secrets, Alberto A. Martínez discusses various popular myths from the history of mathematics: that Pythagoras proved the hypotenuse theorem, that Archimedes figured out how to test the purity of a gold crown while he was in a bathtub, that the Golden Ratio is in nature and ancient architecture, that the young Galois created group theory the night before the pistol duel that killed him, and more. Some stories are partly true, others are entirely false, but all show the power of invention in history. Pythagoras emerges as a symbol of the urge to conjecture and “fill in the gaps” of history. He has been credited with fundamental discoveries in mathematics and the sciences, yet there is nearly no evidence that he really contributed anything to such fields at all. This book asks: how does history change when we subtract the many small exaggerations and interpolations that writers have added for over two thousand years?The Cult of Pythagoras is also about invention in a positive sense. Most people view mathematical breakthroughs as “discoveries” rather than invention or creativity, believing that mathematics describes a realm of eternal ideas. But mathematicians have disagreed about what is possible and impossible, about what counts as a proof, and even about the results of certain operations. Was there ever invention in the history of concepts such as zero, negative numbers, imaginary numbers, quaternions, infinity, and infinitesimals?Martínez inspects a wealth of primary sources, in several languages, over a span of many centuries. By exploring disagreements and ambiguities in the history of the elements of mathematics, The Cult of Pythagoras dispels myths that obscure the actual origins of mathematical concepts. Martínez argues that an accurate history that analyzes myths reveals neglected aspects of mathematics that can encourage creativity in students and mathematicians.

Product Description: This title includes biographies of great mathematician such as Euclid, Pythagoras,and Descartes. The essays in this set were selected from Salem's Great Lives from Historyseries.

In this book, you'll learn why Florence Nightingale introduced pie charts, how Lewis Carroll regarded Pythagoras's theorem, and why some infinities are larger than others. In addition to such well-known figures as Archimedes and Isaac Newton, you'll also meet the mathematician who knew eight languages by the time he was 11, the one who was sent to jail for gambling, the ones who wrote a book on why 1 + 1 = 2, the one who spent his entire life traveling the world, and the one who published a lot but never existed.

Product Description: The interaction of the history of mathematics and mathematics education has long been construed as an esoteric area of inquiry. Much of the research done in this realm has been under the auspices of the history and pedagogy of mathematics group...read more

Product Description: Circles Disturbed brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier--"Don't disturb my circles"--words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction...read more