9780452288119

Numberis an eloquent, accessible tour de force that reveals how the concept of number evolved from prehistoric times through the twentieth century. Tobias Dantzig shows that the development of math—from the invention of counting to the discovery of infinity—is a profoundly human story that progressed by trying and erring, by groping and stumbling.” He shows how commerce, war, and religion led to advances in math, and he recounts the stories of individuals whose breakthroughs expanded the concept of number and created the mathematics that we know today.

Tobias Dantzig was born in Latvia, studied under the great mathematician Henri Poincar+¬ in Paris, and immigrated to the United States in 1910. He taught at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia . University, and the University of Maryland. He died in 1956.
Joseph Mazur is a professor of mathematics at Marlboro College, and is the author of Euclid in the Rainforest.
Barry Mazur is the Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University, and is the author of Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) .

Foreword	p. vii
Editor's Note	p. xiv
Preface to the Fourth Edition	p. xv
Preface to the First Edition	p. xvii
Fingerprints	p. 1
The Empty Column	p. 19
Number-lore	p. 37
The Last Number	p. 59
Symbols	p. 79
The Unutterable	p. 103
This Flowing World	p. 125
The Art of Becoming	p. 145
Filling the Gaps	p. 171
The Domain of Number	p. 187
The Anatomy of the Infinite	p. 215
The Two Realities	p. 239
On the Recording of Numbers	p. 261
Topics in Integers	p. 277
On Roots and Radicals	p. 303
On Principles and Arguments	p. 327
Afterword	p. 343
Notes	p. 351
Further Readings	p. 373
Index	p. 385
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Number : The Language of Science

Number : The Language of Science

0452288118

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