Breakthroughs in Mathematics

by Peter Wolff

History of Mathematics.

Genres: Mathematics

285 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[May Ling · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad I stuck this one out and finally finished it. It's really for the best of the nerds. The book goes through postulates and axioms that are fairly common place, but you have to read past that to get to the author's point, which is pretty interesting.

I like that he tells you why the axioms were controversial in their time. What precisely was that leap of faith this mathematician was taking. Love the way he describes Descartes as taking Euclid to the next level. Before Descartes, people had to prove physically before the axiom/postulate. Descartes was like... hey man... if I can make an equation of it, then there it is.

I like how they show how clever you really had to be to conceive of zero and the implications of thinking about infinite within a finite set of things.

All pretty cool, although possibly the way in which the story is told is boring in places.

[Avi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book. It covers great discoveries (inventions?) of Mathematics, ranging from Archimedes' "The Sand Reckoner" and Euclid's "Elements", up through Bertrand Russell & Peano. However, instead of just talking about that work, he actually includes relevant sections from the works in question and then spends significant time talking about the history of the work, its meaning and its importance in the study of mathematics. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in math, no matter how much you might already know about it.