Customer Reviews

The History of Mathematics: A Reader

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I have been teaching history of mathematics for some years and this is in my view a highly valuable, interesting sourcebook in this field. It is also modern when compared to other sourcebooks. IN particular the authors often provides the reader with different, sometimes contradicting interpretations of the sources, which is both exciting and instructive. Some of these texts also give the reader a sense of the (sometimes) very low reliability of the extant sources, an aspect often ignored in other books on the same subject. A warning: the authors give a minimal amount of explanations in short headings for each chapter; therefore readers -especially beginners- should not expect to find in it a historical narrative. At best it can serve to illustrate such a narrative. Or, in other words, it shoud be read with one of the classical histories of mathematics.