Overview

Why did Florence Nightingale introduce pie charts? How did Lewis Carroll regard Pythagoras? Who learned calculus from her nursery wallpaper? Spanning from the ancient world to the modern age, The Great Mathematicians tells fascinating and unusual tales of the men and women who transformed mathematics. We meet the mathematician who knew eight languages by the time he was 11, the one who was sent to jail for gambling and the one who published a lot yet never existed. As well as providing rich bibliographic detail, Professors Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson explain various theorems using concise and accessible language. These include the Pythagorean theorem, Gödel's Incompleteness theorem, Fermat's Last Theorem and many more. Flood and Wilson are both former presidents of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and are uniquely qualified to lay out this incredible tale. This entertaining and rigorously accurate book presents mathematics with a human face, celebrating the achievements of the greatest mathematicians across history.

Full Product Details

9781788886949

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Robin Wilson is an Oxford graduate, Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, and Emeritus Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London (the oldest mathematical chair in England). He is well known as a popularizer of mathematics, winning two prestigious awards from the Mathematical Association of America for 'outstanding expository writing'. Previous publications include Mathematics and Music: From Pythagoras to Fractals and Sherlock Holmes in Babylon and Other Tales of Mathematical History. Raymond Flood is Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, having been Vice-President of the college and former President of he British Society for the History of Mathematics before retiring in 2010. He enjoys communicating mathematics and its history to non-specialist audiences, as he has done previously on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. Previous publications include James Clerk Maxwell: Perspectives on his Life and Work and Mathematics in Victorian Britain.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available