Product Description

Erudite and entertaining overview follows development of mathematics from ancient Greeks, through Middle Ages and Renaissance to the present. Chapters focus on Logic and Mathematics, the Number, the Fundamental Concept, Differential Calculus, the Theory of Probability and much more. Exercises and problems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36314 in Books
• Published on: 1985-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 641 pages

Customer Reviews

A big book about math
This book was originally written as a textbook (for a math-for-the-non-mathematician type course). It can be used as one (though as a textbook it's a bit dated), read cover-to-cover for edification and pleasure (the style is a bit more instructional than the average popular math book), or dipped into here and there for the topics the reader personally finds interesting. With well over 500 pages of fairly small print, there's a lot here, covering a wide variety of topics, with (it seems to me) particular emphasis on history, geometry (of various kinds), and applications of math to physics. If you leaf through the book, you'll find some pages of nothing but text, some pages full of geometrical diagrams, some of equations and formulas, and even a few Renaissance paintings (in the discussion on mathematical perspective). With so much here, readers will probably find some parts more interesting than others--though which parts are the interesting ones may be a matter of personal opinion.

Entertaining
Kline, a noted historian and educator of mathematics, wrote a book that stands the test of time. This isn't of much use to anyone with high-school math who doesn't care to know why math is the way it is. For everyone else, this is a good book. Solutions to problems at the end of the book are very handy. I recommend this book along with Timothy Gowers's "Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction".

Interesting stuff.....
I am not a mathematician. I just happen to use math everyday in my trade. Just the usual stuff you use in finance. But I am interested in math, maybe just for fun (??!!). And I found this book to be very well written, very interesting and also it has a lot of history so you get to learn a lot and maybe in doing so, you also get to understand more clearly things that just pass you by when you were at school but you didn't really grasp them. This is math pageturner..I'm not kidding !!!