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Scholars generally agree that our ability to count, and our vocabulary of counting, arose to meet practical needs and developed over many thousand years. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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This book can be classified in many ways. In one sense, it is a giant book of mathematics trivia - almost every major and minor aspect of mathematics is represented here in some fashion, from the explanation of cardinal and ordinal numbers to the analytic geometry, calculus, probability and statistics, and symbolic logic. These are arranged in a fairly standard progression, one that most people who have studied mathematics in school will recognise, at least up to the point that they studied.
Another classification of the book can be that of a mathematics encyclopedia. The table of contents, supplemented with the name index and the subject index in the back of the book, makes this a ready reference for short descriptions.
There are fun pieces here - for example, Gullberg derives approximate values for pi in two different scriptural texts (a passage from Kings and a passage from Nehemiah); there are mathematical jokes (yes, there are such things) and puzzles, some of which have only been recently solved (Fermat's last theorem, for example). There are historical pieces and purely mathematical pieces here, and in general the reader will learn about mathematics even when one doesn't understand fully the information being presented.
This is the one drawback of the book - it is not a mathematics textbook. It does not set problems to be solved, but rather presents the theory and ideas, which, if one is not already familiar with them, one will have difficulty learning them for the first time here. There are some pieces that will seem familiar from prior schooling, and no doubt a number of things that will simply make logical sense, but for those who have not had differential or integral calculus, for example, the explanations here will likely make sense in the general philosophy behind the ideas (the two are essentially opposite forms of the same problems) but the actual mathematical operations will not be so comprehensible.
This is not to say that the mathematically illiterate need be intimidated by this book - the good thing about this text is that it does have something for everyone regardless of mathematical proficiency, and can enlighten and entertain people from those who live for numbers to those who run from them at top speed.
Chapters can be read pretty much separately and in any order. Apart from using it to review and improve my math, I find it of fantastic assistance as a reference when reading technically dense material.
My only fault with this book are the sections on calculus and integration, which are a bit rushed, but this is minor compared to the overall quality of the of the text. The sections on the history and developments of mathematics are worth the price of the book alone. It's expensive, but beautifully bound and printed (the author did his own typesetting); you will been reading this book years from the day you buy it, unlike so many popular math paperbacks.
The author has found a cohesive way to bring all these different, but interrelated subdisciplines of math together for a fantastic, easy to use math companion.
Great gift idea (once you've picked up a copy for yourself)! Useful to high school students. I wish this had been on my bookshelf when I was in high school. A must have! Thank you, Jan Gullberg!
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