History of Mathematics

What makes a bridge wobble when it's not meant to? How do billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? How does a building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what ha...ppens when maths goes wrong in the real world. As Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths: computer programmes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths works quietly behind the scenes, until ... it doesn't. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman empire and a hapless Olympic shooting team, Matt Parker shows us the bizarre ways maths trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. This book shows how, by making maths our friend, we can learn from its pitfalls. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks, jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.
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A comprehensive look at four of the most famous problems in mathematics Tales of Impossibility recounts the intriguing story of the so-called problems of antiquity, four of the most famous and studied questions in the history of mathematics. First posed by the ancient Greeks, the...se compass and straightedge problems-squaring the circle, trisecting an angle, doubling the cube, and inscribing regular polygons in a circle-have served as ever-present muses for mathematicians for more than two millennia. David Richeson follows the trail of these problems to show that ultimately, their proofs-demonstrating the impossibility of solving them using only a compass and straightedge-depended upon and resulted in the growth of mathematics. Richeson explores how celebrated luminaries, including Euclid, Archimedes, Viete, Descartes, Newton, and Gauss labored to understand the problems of antiquity, and how many major mathematical discoveries were related to these explorations. Though the problems were based in geometry, their resolutions were not, and had to wait until the nineteenth century, when mathematicians had developed the theory of real and complex numbers, analytic geometry, algebra, and calculus. A little-known mathematician named Pierre Wantzel and Ferdinand von Lindemann, through his work on , finally determined the problems were impossible to solve. Along the way, Richeson provides entertaining anecdotes connected to the problems, such as how the Indiana legislature passed a bill setting an incorrect value for , and how Leonardo da Vinci made elegant contributions to the puzzles. Taking readers from the classical period to the present, Tales of Impossibility demonstrates how four unsolvable problems captivated mathematical thinking for centuries.
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A magisterial history of calculus (and the people behind it) from one of the world's foremost popularisers of mathematics.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Most people enjoy maths - the problem is they don't know that they do. This revolutionary and accessible exploration of the role of mathematics as an historical aide to human activity will change the general public's relationship to numbers for the be...tter.
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Lewis Carroll's books have delighted children and adults for generations, but behind their exuberant fantasy and delightful nonsense was the mind of a brilliant mathematician. This title explores the curious imagination of this man who filled his writings with problems, paradoxes..., puzzles and teasing games of logic.
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