Carl B. Boyer (1906–1976)

This book is probably a god-send for your average mathematician. But for the average reader, no matter how well versed in mathematics he/she is, this book is too esoteric to be more than occasionally interesting. In general, it's too comprehensive (and incomprehensible) for the cost of time/energy to read. I can understand the need for detail:

"Another paper of great influence in the trend to abstraction was Ernst Steinitz's work on the algebraic theory of fields, which appeared in the winter of 1909-1910 and had been motivated by Kurt Hensel's work on p-adic fields."
or
"Heesch thought that the four-color conjecture could be solved by considering a set of around 8,900 configurations."

I won't say that the book was never interesting [did you know that our "Arabic numbers" are really Indian inspired? Ever since my visit to Egypt many years ago I wondered why their numbers were different from ours.] Anyway, I have enough Science Fiction background that I recognized most of the buzz-words: Riemann fields, topology, tensors, pseudosphere(?), Hermitian matrices....

If I were an advanced student of Mathematics I would definitely give this book a 5-star rating. But, given that I actually was able to plow through the entire book, and comprehended so little, tells even me that the author was not intrinsically boring. There's a phenomenal amount of information in this book; it's just a shame that I understood so little of it. However, I may have been inspired to see if I can find an "advanced math for dummies" book. Just what is "non Euclidean geometry"?… (mer)

This book reminds me of E.T. Bell's book, Men of Mathematics. It contains the history of mathematical discoveries as they are known to scholars. For instance, it shows that certain theorems were known to the oriental nations like China and India, and that a lot of things had to be rediscovered after the whole rigmarole with the fall of empires and nations and the destruction of ancient repositories of knowledge.

It starts with counting and goes on through the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans. After the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, we follow mathematical thought to India, China and Arabia. Throughout the book, it covers quadratics and how the ancients thought of them and goes on through the founding of Calculus and Analysis. The Giants are all covered, with Euler and Gauss each getting their own chapters. Basically, with every big name or thought in mathematics, the book is there, offering an opinion on stuff. Most of the stuff is priority of discovery, which is a huge thing to mathematicians.

This book is really interesting, but it takes a while for me to read the notation. I really wish I was better at that, but I am working on it.… (mer)