The Great Mathematicians: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe

by Flood, Raymond

• ISBN13: 9781848588431
• ISBN10: 1848588437
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-09-01
• Publisher: Atlasbooks Dist Serv

Summary

In this book, you'll learn why Florence Nightingale introduced pie charts, how Lewis Carroll regarded Pythagoras, and why some infinities are larger than others. You'll also meet the mathematician who knew eight languages by the time he was eleven, the one who was sent to jail for gambling, and the one who published a lot yet never existed.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 11
Maps	p. 14
Ancient Mathematics	p. 19
The Egyptians	p. 22
The Mesopotamians	p. 26
Thales	p. 30
Pythagoras	p. 34
Plato and Aristotle	p. 38
Euclid	p. 42
Archimedes	p. 46
Apollonius	p. 50
Hipparchus and Ptolemy	p. 53
Diophantus	p. 56
Pappus and Hypatia	p. 60
Nicomachus and Boethius	p. 63
The Chinese	p. 65
The Indians	p. 69
The Mayans	p. 73
Al-Khwarizmi	p. 76
Alhazen and Omar Khayyan	p. 79
Early European Mathematics	p. 83
Gerbert	p. 86
Fibonacci	p. 89
Early Oxford mathematicians	p. 93
Oresme	p. 96
Regiomontanus	p. 100
Perspective painters	p. 103
Pacioli and da Vinci	p. 106
Recorde	p. 109
Cardano and Tartaglia	p. 112
Bombelli	p. 116
Mercator	p. 120
Copernicus and Galileo	p. 122
Kepler	p. 125
Viète	p. 128
Harriot	p. 132
Mersenne and Kircher	p. 135
Desargues	p. 138
Awakening and Enlightenment	p. 142
Napier and Briggs	p. 145
Fermat	p. 149
Descartes	p. 153
Pascal	p. 157
Cavalieri and Roberval	p. 161
Huygens	p. 165
Wallis	p. 168
Newton	p. 171
Wren, Hooke and Halley	p. 174
Leibniz	p. 178
Jacob Bernoulli	p. 182
Johann Bernoulli	p. 185
Newton's successors	p. 189
D'Alembert	p. 193
Euler	p. 197
Lagrange	p. 201
Laplace	p. 205
The Age of Revolutions	p. 209
Gauss	p. 213
Germain	p. 217
Monge and Poncelet	p. 221
Cauchy	p. 225
Fourier and Poisson	p. 229
Abel and Galois	p. 233
Möbius	p. 237
Bolyai and Lobachevsky	p. 241
Babbage and Lovelace	p. 246
Hamilton	p. 249
Boole	p. 253
Green and Stokes	p. 257
Thomas and Tait	p. 261
Maxwell	p. 265
Kirkman	p. 269
Cayley and Sylvester	p. 273
Chebyshev	p. 277
Nightingale	p. 281
Riemann	p. 284
Dodgson	p. 288
Cantor	p. 292
Kovalevskaya	p. 296
Klein	p. 300
The Modern Age	p. 304
Hilbert	p. 307
Poincaré	p. 311
Russell and Gödel	p. 315
Einstein and Minkowski	p. 319
Hardy, Littlewood and Ramanujan	p. 323
Noether	p. 327
Von Neumann	p. 331
Turing	p. 334
Bourbaki	p. 338
Robinson and Matiyasevich	p. 341
Appel and Haken	p. 345
Mandelbrot	p. 349
Wiles	p. 352
Perelman	p. 356
Fields Medallists	p. 361
Further reading	p. 366
Index	p. 372
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