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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A dated History of Mathematics, 6 Oct 2002
By A Customer
The most important thing to realise about this book is that "... no material changes have been made since the issue of the second edition in 1893". As if the date were not bad enough, the author has taken the decision to not write about mathematicians who were still alive at the time of writing. Thus the 19th century is not fully covered, or rather I should say scantly covered.The first 100 pages or so are concerned with early geometry and somehow it just seemed deadly dull. The last 50 or so pages seemed to be just listings of mathematicians who had done stuff, and was equally dull. It is the centre section of this work which is worthy of mention. It is not just the chronology of events that is important; one needs a feeling of the personalities and problems of the mathematicians involved. The author supplies these with great skill. Thus the core of the book is sound, interesting and authoritative. Perhaps my only objection to the style involved is the use of quotations in French and Latin. Whilst a century ago the reader may well have been fully conversant with Latin and French, I doubt that this is the case now. Whilst I understand the author's natural desire to present the material without the additional "distance" of a translation, I think a full page of Latin is going rather too far! I think that the modern reader would, like me, prefer to skim over these foreign language parts, rather than dive in and translate them. Even the simple Latin phrase "urbi et orbi" took several dictionaries to decode (meaning "to the city and to the world", ie to everyone). Thus one feels that the author had something important to say at one of these foreign language quotations, but whatever it was got missed by the reader. Whilst in its day this history was no doubt well received, I feel that it is dated by its date! The language used is very clear and readable, it is just that I think a more modern version, fully covering the 19th century and at least the first part of the 20th century, if such a history exists, may now be preferable. Having said that, I have a horrible feeling that the mathematics of the 20th century may be so obscure and abstract as to be unintelligible to the non-mathematician. Leslie Green CEng MIEE
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by Ian Stewart
