This book studies the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) as a new type of ‘man of knowledge’. Stevin exemplifies a wider trend of polymathy in the early modern period. Polymaths played a crucial role in the transformation of European learning.

One of the twentieth century's most original mathematicians and thinkers, Karl Menger taught students of many backgrounds. In this, his radical revision of the traditional calculus text, he presents pure and applied calculus in a unified conceptual frame, offering a thorough understanding of theory as well as of the methodology underlying the use of calculus as a tool. The most outstanding feature of this text is the care with which it explains basic ideas, a feature that makes it equally suitable for beginners and experienced readers. The text begins with a "mini-calculus" which brings out the fundamental results without recourse to the notions of limit and continuity. The standard subject matter is then presented as a pure and unambiguous calculus of functions. The issues surrounding the applications of pure calculus to problems in the sciences are faced in a forthright manner by carefully analyzing the meaning of "variable quantity" and clarified by resuscitating Newton's concept of fluents. The accompanying exercises are original, insightful and an integral part of the text. This Dover edition features a new Preface and Guide to Further Reading by Bert Schweizer and Abe Sklar.

This study focuses on statics' original simplicity as an exercise in logic, without resort to extensive mathematical detail. Discussions of significant historical discoveries offer an enjoyable, useful view of the field. 1982 edition.

Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics offers a detailed but accessible account of a wide range of mathematical ideas. Starting with elementary concepts, it leads the reader towards aspects of current mathematical research. The book explains how conceptual hurdles in the development of numbers and number systems were overcome in the course of history, from Babylon to Classical Greece, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and so to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrative moves from the Pythagorean insistence on positive multiples to the gradual acceptance of negative numbers, irrationals and complex numbers as essential tools in quantitative analysis. Within this chronological framework, chapters are organised thematically, covering a variety of topics and contexts: writing and solving equations, geometric construction, coordinates and complex numbers, perceptions of ‘infinity’ and its permissible uses in mathematics, number systems, and evolving views of the role of axioms. Through this approach, the author demonstrates that changes in our understanding of numbers have often relied on the breaking of long-held conventions to make way for new inventions at once providing greater clarity and widening mathematical horizons. Viewed from this historical perspective, mathematical abstraction emerges as neither mysterious nor immutable, but as a contingent, developing human activity. Making up Numbers will be of great interest to undergraduate and A-level students of mathematics, as well as secondary school teachers of the subject. In virtue of its detailed treatment of mathematical ideas, it will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more about the development of the subject.

This book collects nine related mathematical essays which will intrigue and inform. From the reviews: "The authors put their writing where their talents are, and students get to see just how alive mathematics is...there is much to commend the book. It contains plenty of interesting mathematics, often going in unusual directions. I like the diagrams; the authors have chosen mathematics that involves especially pretty ones." --THE MATHEMATICAL ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems. Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once — setting the stage for the modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.