Synopses & Reviews
For many years, famed mathematics historian and master teacher Howard Eves collected stories and anecdotes about mathematics and mathematicians, gathering them together in six Mathematical Circles books. Thousands of teachers of mathematics have read these stories and anecdotes for their own enjoyment and used them in the classroom - to add entertainment, to introduce a human element, to inspire the student, and to forge some links of cultural history. All six of the Mathematical Circles books have been reissued as a three-volume edition. This three-volume set is a must for all who enjoy the mathematical enterprise, especially those who appreciate the human and cultural aspects of mathematics.
Synopsis
For many years, famed mathematics historian and master teacher Howard Eves collected stories and anecdotes about mathematics and mathematicians, gathering them together in six Mathematical Circles books. Thousands of teachers of mathematics have read these stories and anecdotes for their own enjoyment and used them in the classroom - to add entertainment, to introduce a human element, to inspire the student, and to forge some links of cultural history. All six of the Mathematical Circles books have been reissued as a three-volume edition.
Synopsis
A collection of stories and anecdotes about mathematics and mathematicians.
About the Author
Howard Eves spent most of his teaching career at the University of Maine at Orono, and more recently at Central Florida University. For 25 years, he edited the Elementary Problems Section of the American Mathematical Monthly. His books include: Great Moments in Mathematics Before 1650, Mathematical Reminiscences, Introduction to the History of Mathematics, and his two-volume Survey of Geometry.
Table of Contents
Quadrant 1. The animal world, real and imaginary; Primitive man; Pre-Hellenic mathematics; A few later Chinese stories; Thales; Pythagoras; The Pythagorean brotherhood; Pythagoreanism; Plato; Euclid; Achimedes; Eratosthenes and Apollonius; Diophantus; The end of the Greek period; Quadrant II. Hindu mathematics; Arabian mathematics; The return of mathematics to Western Europe; The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; The episode of cubic and quartic equations; François Viète; Simon Stevin, John Napier, and Harry Briggs; Thomas Harriot and William Oughtred; Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler; Gerard Desargues and Blaise Pascal; RenéDescartes and Pierre de Fermat; Quadrant III. Some minor stories about some minor men; Pre-Newtonian versus post-Newtonian mathematics; Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; The Bernoullis; The small initial understanding of the calculus; Bonaventura Cavalieri, Yoshida Koyu, and Seki Kowa; Some lesser seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British mathematicians; Some lesser seventeenth- and eighteenth-century continental mathematicians; Leonhard Euler; Lagrange; Napoleon Bonaparte; Quadrant IV. Abel and Agnesi; Charles Babbage; Some B's; Carlyle and Legendre; Mathematicians and nature lovers; Clifford and Dodgson; Calculating prodigies; Augustus de Morgan, Albert Einstein; Skipping through the F's; Carl Friedrich Gauss; Some little men; Hamilton and Hardy; Ten miscellaneous stories; J. J. Sylvester and Norbert Wiener.