Along the coast of Peru is one of the driest deserts in the world. Here, under the sand, the ancient Peruvians buried their dead wrapped in gorgeous textiles. As organic material keeps almost forever when stored without humidity, light and oxygen, many of the mummies excavated in the last hundred years are in excellent conditions. And so are the textiles wrapped around them. Their clear colors are still dazzling and the textile fibers in good condition. Textiles were highly valued objects in ancient Peru - used for expressing status and diverse messages in these non-literate but highly organized and very developed cultures. Much energy, innovation and aesthetic sensibility were invested in the textiles. The preColumbian peoples had access to exquisite materials: the local fibers were camelid fibers (alpaca and vicuña), cotton and plant fibers (agave, for instance). The camelid fibers have very little scales compared to sheep fibers, and are long, soft and lustrous. The Peruvian cotton grew in 5 different colors. The ancient Peruvians were also master dyers and have for thousands of years dyed their yarn with indigo blue, madder red, cochineal red, sea snail purple and yellow from many kinds of plants. And so they produced some of the finest, most beautiful and most interesting textiles in the world. Instead of writing, they kept the order in their world encoded in textile fibers. The Roemer- and Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim houses a collection of 405 preColumbian textiles. Most of them are fragments, but a few complete pieces are present. I have chosen 133 pieces for this publication, to represent the collection at its best.

This eighth volume of Imagine Math is different from all the previous ones. The reason is very clear: in the last two years, the world changed, and we still do not know what the world of tomorrow will look like. Difficult to make predictions. This volume has a subtitle Dreaming Venice. Venice, the dream city of dreams, that miraculous image of a city on water that resisted for hundreds of years, has become in the last two years truly unreachable. Many things tie this book to the previous ones. Once again, this volume also starts like Imagine Math 7, with a homage to the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino who created exclusively for the Imagine Math 8 volume a new series of ten original and unique works of art dedicated to Piero della Francesca. Many artists, art historians, designers and musicians are involved in the new book, including Linda D. Henderson and Marco Pierini, Claudio Ambrosini and Davide Amodio. Space also for comics and mathematics in a Disney key. Many applications, from Origami to mathematical models for world hunger. Particular attention to classical and modern architecture, with Tullia Iori. As usual, the topics are treated in a way that is rigorous but captivating, detailed and full of evocations. This is an all-embracing look at the world of mathematics and culture.

The present volume provides a fascinating overview of geometrical ideas and perceptions from the earliest cultures to the mathematical and artistic concepts of the 20th century. It is the English translation of the 3rd edition of the well-received German book “5000 Jahre Geometrie,” in which geometry is presented as a chain of developments in cultural history and their interaction with architecture, the visual arts, philosophy, science and engineering. Geometry originated in the ancient cultures along the Indus and Nile Rivers and in Mesopotamia, experiencing its first “Golden Age” in Ancient Greece. Inspired by the Greek mathematics, a new germ of geometry blossomed in the Islamic civilizations. Through the Oriental influence on Spain, this knowledge later spread to Western Europe. Here, as part of the medieval Quadrivium, the understanding of geometry was deepened, leading to a revival during the Renaissance. Together with parallel achievements in India, China, Japan and the ancient American cultures, the European approaches formed the ideas and branches of geometry we know in the modern age: coordinate methods, analytical geometry, descriptive and projective geometry in the 17th an 18th centuries, axiom systems, geometry as a theory with multiple structures and geometry in computer sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries. Each chapter of the book starts with a table of key historical and cultural dates and ends with a summary of essential contents of geometr y in the respective era. Compelling examples invite the reader to further explore the problems of geometry in ancient and modern times. The book will appeal to mathematicians interested in Geometry and to all readers with an interest in cultural history. From letters to the authors for the German language edition I hope it gets a translation, as there is no comparable work. Prof. J. Grattan-Guinness (Middlesex University London) "Five Thousand Years of Geometry" - I think it is the most handsome book I have ever seen from Springer and the inclusion of so many color plates really improves its appearance dramatically! Prof. J.W. Dauben (City University of New York) An excellent book in every respect. The authors have successfully combined the history of geometry with the general development of culture and history. ... The graphic design is also excellent. Prof. Z. Nádenik (Czech Technical University in Prague)

The Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Germany, houses Europe's largest collection of PreColumbian textiles-around 9000 well-preserved examples. Lena Bjerregaard was conservator of these materials 2000-2014, and she worked with many international researchers to analyze and publicize the collection. This book includes seven of their essays on the museum's holdings - by Bea Hoffmann, Ann Peters, Susan Bergh, Lena Bjerregaard, Jane Feltham, Katalin Nagy, and Gary Urton. Its second part is a 177-page catalogue of 273 selected representative items, arranged by period and style. There are more than 380 photographs. Styles or cultures shown include Paracas, Nasca, Sican/Lambayeque, Ychsma, Chavin, Siguas, Tiwanaku, Wari, Chimu, Central Coast, Chancay, South Coast, Inca, and Colonial. Items pictured include tunics, clothing, tapestry, hats, belts, headbands, samplers, borders, and khipus. Materials include camelid fibers, feathers, hair, cotton, reed, straw, and other plant fibers.

Between the 1880s and 1980s, British excavations at locations across Egypt resulted in the discovery of hundreds of thousands of ancient objects that were subsequently sent to some 350 institutions worldwide. These finds included unique discoveries at iconic sites such as the tombs of ancient Egypt's first rulers at Abydos, Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s city of Tell el-Amarna and rich Roman Era burials in the Fayum. Scattered Finds explores the politics, personalities and social histories that linked fieldwork in Egypt with the varied organizations around the world that received finds. Case studies range from Victorian municipal museums and women’s suffrage campaigns in the UK, to the development of some of the USA’s largest institutions, and from university museums in Japan to new institutions in post-independence Ghana. By juxtaposing a diversity of sites for the reception of Egyptian cultural heritage over the period of a century, Alice Stevenson presents new ideas about the development of archaeology, museums and the construction of Egyptian heritage. She also addresses the legacy of these practices, raises questions about the nature of the authority over such heritage today, and argues for a stronger ethical commitment to its stewardship. Praise for Scattered Finds 'Scattered Finds is a remarkable achievement. In charting how British excavations in Egypt dispersed artefacts around the globe, at an unprecedented scale, Alice Stevenson shows us how ancient objects created knowledge about the past while firmly anchored in the present. No one who reads this timely book will be able to look at an Egyptian antiquity in the same way again.' Professor Christina Riggs, UEA