Overview

This book masterfully illustrates the life course of numbers, taking the reader on a walk through a museum of historical artifacts, manuscripts, and works of art. The authors recount how numbers lived in now extinct civilizations, with photographs of archaeological remains, Roman coins, preromanic manuscripts, incunabula; how people learned to use numbers to count, showing Renaissance mercantile arithmetic books; and how numbers evolved into the Western counting system that we use today, with the first recorded usage of the current arithmetic symbols. The authors explore not only the history and use of numbers, but also the physical shape of numbers assumed in writing, including their life at the printing presses at the height of the Renaissance, and in prints of Leonardo da Vinci and Durero, typographical designs, and both celestial and terrestrial maps.

Full Product Details

9781568813257

Table of Contents

Reviews

The authors are to be commended...they include information about the mathematical work of the Mayas of Central America, the Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Indians and the Chinese. Without question, the best part of the book is the enormous number of illustrations of clay tablets, manuscripts, paintings, tapestries and other artifacts of the mathematical world... It is so well done that it could serve as a text in history courses covering the simultaneous co-development of technology in different civilizations. -Ashbacher Charles, JRM, February 2007

Author Information

Antonio J. Duran is curator of the exhibition, The Life of Numbers at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, Spain. George Ifrah is author of The Universal History of Numbers and The Universal History of Computing: From the Abacus to the Quantum Computer. Alberto Manguel is author of A History of Reading, Reading Pictures: What We Think About When We Look at Art, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

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