Mathematical Circles
For many years, famed mathematics historian and master teacher Howard Eves collected stories and anecdotes about mathematics and mathematicians, gathering them together in six Mathematical Circles books. Thousands of teachers of mathematics have read these stories and anecdotes for their own enjoyment and used them in the classroom - to add entertainment, to introduce a human element, to inspire the student, and to forge some links of cultural history. All six of the Mathematical Circles books have been reissued as a three-volume edition. This three-volume set is a must for all who enjoy the mathematical enterprise, especially those who appreciate the human and cultural aspects of mathematics.
- A collection of mathematical stories and anecdotes by an experienced and famous author
- Ideal as either a recreational maths book or as a useful teaching aid
- The first of a three-part reissued set of books
Reviews & endorsements
'The 360 different anecdotes compiled in these delightful volumes will add zest to every teacher's mathematical classes. There are appropriate selections for all levels of students. They are short, succinct, and at the same time given in simple settings which enable the reader to identify with the story and its implications. Here is presented the kind of material that makes the difference to the undecided student. I highly recommend you putting a copy next to your worktable.' The Mathematics Teacher
Product details
November 2004Hardback
9780883855423
316 pages
237 × 160 × 23 mm
0.574kg
38 b/w illus.
This item is not supplied by Cambridge University Press in your region. Please contact Mathematical Association of America for availability.
Table of Contents
- Quadrant 1. The animal world, real and imaginary
- Primitive man
- Pre-Hellenic mathematics
- A few later Chinese stories
- Thales
- Pythagoras
- The Pythagorean brotherhood
- Pythagoreanism
- Plato
- Euclid
- Achimedes
- Eratosthenes and Apollonius
- Diophantus
- The end of the Greek period
- Quadrant II. Hindu mathematics
- Arabian mathematics
- The return of mathematics to Western Europe
- The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries
- The episode of cubic and quartic equations
- François Viète
- Simon Stevin, John Napier, and Harry Briggs
- Thomas Harriot and William Oughtred
- Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler
- Gerard Desargues and Blaise Pascal
- René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat
- Quadrant III. Some minor stories about some minor men
- Pre-Newtonian versus post-Newtonian mathematics
- Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- The Bernoullis
- The small initial understanding of the calculus
- Bonaventura Cavalieri, Yoshida Koyu, and Seki Kowa
- Some lesser seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British mathematicians
- Some lesser seventeenth- and eighteenth-century continental mathematicians
- Leonhard Euler
- Lagrange
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- Quadrant IV. Abel and Agnesi
- Charles Babbage
- Some B's
- Carlyle and Legendre
- Mathematicians and nature lovers
- Clifford and Dodgson
- Calculating prodigies
- Augustus de Morgan, Albert Einstein
- Skipping through the F's
- Carl Friedrich Gauss
- Some little men
- Hamilton and Hardy
- Ten miscellaneous stories
- J. J. Sylvester and Norbert Wiener.