“The Universe offers an unending stream of new mathematical puzzles to explore, and mathematicians have never stopped looking for patterns both in numbers and in the real world.
Counting, measuring, and calculating changes are as old as civilization itself, as are many of the theorems and laws of math.
The Pythagorean Theorem was used to plot out fields for planting crops before the Ancient Greek Pythagoras was even born. ‘Mathematics, an Illustrated History of Numbers tells the fascinating story behind mathematical discoveries.
* Legend has it that the first magic square, where all lines and diagonals add up to the same figure, was revealed more than 2,000 years ago when a river turtle appeared to have ancient Chinese numerals inscribed on sections of its shell.
* The largest number the ancient Greeks envisioned was a myriad ‘myriad’ which is 100 million, but the 1920s a nine-year-old coined the word Googleplex, 10googol, a number so large it can never be written down.
* The great German mathematician Georg Cantor showed that there is an infinite number of infinities.
* One of the central tools of statistics was developed in 1898 when Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, a Russian mathematician, computed the odds on a Prussian cavalryman being killed when kicked by a horse.”
In general this book is nice and easy to read without complicated equations. I’d read it to my daughter, a nine years old, and she enjoyed the explanations and she looked at each illustrations with enthusiastic! At the end, on the back cover of the book you will find a ‘Time History Of Math’ bookelet with a contend of “Culture, World Events, Science & Invention, Mathematics, from 4000 BCE—1000 BCE
Enjoy it if you read it!