Customer Reviews

History of Mathematics (AMS Chelsea Publishing)

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The Encyclopędia Britannica entry on Florian Cajori says, in part:

Cajori, Florian
born Feb. 28, 1859, St. Aignan, Switz.
died Aug. 14, 1930, Berkeley, Calif., U.S

"Cajori emigrated to the United States in 1875 and taught at Tulane University in New Orleans (1885-88) and at Colorado College (1889-1918), where he also served as dean of the department of engineering (1903-18). In 1918 he became professor of the history of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley."

Reference: "Cajori, Florian." Encyclopędia Britannica from Encyclopędia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD.

The first edition of this History of Mathematics occurred in 1893. Subsequent editions were in 1919, 1980, 1985, and this 5th edition in 1991. Apart from stylistic changes and minor corrections, the main revisions in the 3rd and later editions are said by the editor to be concerned with the eight page chapter on Babylonian mathematics, which was rewritten for the 4th edition and partly rewritten for the 5th. A book of similar title by Cajori, A History of Elementary Mathematics, although based upon this book under review, is a different work.

This is a densely written book, and especially in its later chapters assumes a mathematical background consonant with the period in which it was originally published. This is not a textbook. It is a scholarly discussion on the history of its subject. The historical limit of Cajori's discussion, mentioned in the preface to the 3rd edition and operative still in the current edition, is "the close of World War I." His viewpoint is not that of a modern reader. He is writing during the first blooms of 20th century abstract mathematics. The 1st edition of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, which he mentions, occurred over the course of the years 1910 to 1913. The 1st edition of Felix Hausdorff's Grundzüge der Mengenlehre, which he doesn't mention, occurred in 1914. Emmy Noether (1882-1935) didn't arrive at Göttingen until 1915. Bourbaki's first book wasn't published until 1939.

Although Cajori lived until 1930, in revising his book for the 2nd edition (later editions occurred after his death), he could not know where mathematics was going in its methods of abstraction or how educational reforms and popular culture would affect the intellectual background and concerns of future readers, and so he could not write his history to speak to the viewpoint and expectations of a reader in the 21st century. But if you enjoy this sort of thing, this book is worth your attention, regardless of how well you understand everything in it.

The editor of the 3rd edition remarks: "With so vast and complex a subject to set forth within so small a compass, the author of a one-volume history of Mathematics must decide what facts to select, what interrelations to point out, whom to name, how much to explain, and the like. There is no optimum, no one way of doing this. Every one-volume history of mathematics is therefore necessarily very different. Indeed, each of the few that exist are, as the reader can easily verify, strikingly different." (p. iii)

This isn't a proper e-book. It obviously is just a raw OCR scan without any human 'cleaning up'. I feel I should be given a proper copy for my Kindle when it's appropriately formatted. Riddled with misspellings and 'junk'. Especially when dealing with mathematics formatting is key, otherwise the book is unreadable.

Because of this, I am unable to review the actual content of the book.