Customer Reviews

Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The author of this book is not a professional mathematician, but rather someone who has deeply fallen in love with math and wants to share his passion. His enthusiasm is infectuous. I came away from this book thinking that perhaps math really is the purest, most profound, most beautiful of all human endeavors. I know that many mathematicians feel that way, but I had never before experienced it myself. Immersion in this book produces a state of total mental engagement that I normally reach only when reading Shakespeare or playing Bach. Be aware, however, that a fairly high level of mathematical competency is required for full comprehension, and that for non-mathematicians like myself the book is only partially accessible. But I don't view that as a drawback: the book makes you want to study and develop your technical understanding sufficiently to truly enjoy the more esoteric topics the book discusses. That's what happened to me. I find myself reading up on calculus and going through old college textbooks of mine. It must be a pretty good book that can accomplish that!

How did this guy do it? He wasn't even a mathematician - he was a doctor. And he wrote a book that's fascinating for both mathematicians and non-mathematicians. The book goes all the way from the incention of numbers and the most elementary arithmetic, all the way through elemetary calculus. Along the way he manages to give at least an introduction to fractals, combinatorics, non-Euclidean geometry, harmonic analysis, and probability - all topics which the typical American student would probably miss on her or his way through the standard sequence of material leading up through calculus.

But Gullberg does much more than just present the material. He includes the history of how - and WHY - each major mathematical innovation was developed, placing the entire subject in a human and historical context that is missing from almost any other book on any of these many topics.

I don't care how much math you know - there are almost certainly historical facts in here that you haven't encountered before. And I don't care how LITTLE math you know - you'll find this book accessible and fascinating.

The only thing I didn't care for was the silly little limericks and cartoons scattered throughout the book. Most of them weren't funny, and served only to distract the reader from the fascinating material.

This book should be read thoroughly from page 1 through page 1039, and then read over and over again, as you dip randomly into whatever chapters happen to strike your fancy at any particular time, for the rest of your life. I originally bought a paperback copy, but I soon realized that I had to have a hardcover version that will stay on my shelf until the day I die - except when it's in my lap or on my desk.

Unparalleled and irreplaceable.

I hate mathematics. My wife, a former National Merit scholar and professional cryptographer, enjoys working out advanced equations of all varieties. Both of us appreciate this book. Gullberg combines historical overview and practicality as he advances through the universe of numbers and equations. I have enjoyed reading his commentaries and anecdotes which appear throughout the text. My wife has turned to it for understanding problems related to her work. This is a book for school or home library, that belongs on any shelf where there are people eager to learn or in need of an in-depth understanding of algebra, calculus, trigonometry, topology, or more advanced studies. It is worth the price and will not quickly become obsolete like so many other scientific texts.

Gullberg gathered and organized this book over a ten year period. It is a charming compendium. I have been looking things up in it and browsing it for five years, and there are many areas I have not yet touched. I will be enjoying it for another five or ten years.

Why do I like it? Here are five reasons, one for each star.

First, it has wealth of facts and formulas, and it gives you a bit of history with the material. It is nice to see where things came from. Second, if you need to look something up, this is a good place to find it. Third, if you have studied mathematics or used it, you will meet your old friends on these pages, and you will learn something new about some of them. Fourth, if you are keen about the subject, you will see interesting ways of drawing connections between various results and subjects in this book. Fifth, the author's good humor and broad culture shine on these pages so that reading this book is a pleasure.

Editorial reviewer Donald Albers got it right in his Scientific American review when he said that if you were to have just one mathematics book on your shelf, this would be the book to have. I have many mathematics books. This is one that I keep close at hand in my office.

Highly recommended.

This is one of those books that will give you tons of pleasure. Major areas of mathematics are explored with pertinent examples. The writing is good and the layout of the material is superb. Just pick a topic at random, read through the material, and then work the examples. There are no exercises. For instance, the chapter; Derivatives and Differentials, is superb with some history included. The material serves very well as a refresher rather than as a "teacher". So if you have not been exposed to Calculus before do NOT expect to learn it here.

This book; for example, will NOT teach you Calculus. But it WILL whet your appetite sufficiently for you to delve deeper. On the other hand if you have already had Calculus the book will serve as an excellent refresher and reference source. I usually read a topic two to three times before I really get the idea and technique involved.

An excellent reference that I use quite often.

Jan Gullberg describes his impulse to write this book as deriving from conversations with his son, who was studying engineering. Gullberg himself was not a mathematician, but rather a surgeon of international standing; mathematics became a hobby of his, an intellectual pursuit with practical applications that he could share with his son. This thick book (nearly 1100 pages) has over a thousand drawings, which were prepared by Gullberg's son, Par.

This book can be classified in many ways. In one sense, it is a giant book of mathematics trivia - almost every major and minor aspect of mathematics is represented here in some fashion, from the explanation of cardinal and ordinal numbers to the analytic geometry, calculus, probability and statistics, and symbolic logic. These are arranged in a fairly standard progression, one that most people who have studied mathematics in school will recognise, at least up to the point that they studied.

Another classification of the book can be that of a mathematics encyclopedia. The table of contents, supplemented with the name index and the subject index in the back of the book, makes this a ready reference for short descriptions.

There are fun pieces here - for example, Gullberg derives approximate values for pi in two different scriptural texts (a passage from Kings and a passage from Nehemiah); there are mathematical jokes (yes, there are such things) and puzzles, some of which have only been recently solved (Fermat's last theorem, for example). There are historical pieces and purely mathematical pieces here, and in general the reader will learn about mathematics even when one doesn't understand fully the information being presented.

This is the one drawback of the book - it is not a mathematics textbook. It does not set problems to be solved, but rather presents the theory and ideas, which, if one is not already familiar with them, one will have difficulty learning them for the first time here. There are some pieces that will seem familiar from prior schooling, and no doubt a number of things that will simply make logical sense, but for those who have not had differential or integral calculus, for example, the explanations here will likely make sense in the general philosophy behind the ideas (the two are essentially opposite forms of the same problems) but the actual mathematical operations will not be so comprehensible.

This is not to say that the mathematically illiterate need be intimidated by this book - the good thing about this text is that it does have something for everyone regardless of mathematical proficiency, and can enlighten and entertain people from those who live for numbers to those who run from them at top speed.

This book is a rare achievement. It is a survey of mathematics that both broad in scope yet concise in its explanations. It isn't simply a history of the development of mathemeatics and yet it takes us through the its development in a very wonderful way.

It is delightful to just read through from left to right and yet each chapter acts as an introdcution the reader can use as a springboard to very deep study of an amazing range of mathematical topics. In the foreward, Prof. Hilton of SUNY says it very well: "The unstated premise of this book - a premise that virtually all mathematicians would agree to - is that mathematics, like music, is worth doing for its own sake."

After reading this book, even a non-mathematician can agree.

There are those of us who, in silence and shame, survived a
university BSc program with a smattering of "gentlemen's" 2.5
GP's in our math courses. What hurts is being fascinated with
mathematics in spite of never quite getting the hang of certain
really essential concepts and techniques. Well, here comes Jan
Gullberg to the rescue. In one volume he covers a remarkably
thorough array of mathematical subjects in a highly understandable but accurate presentation. What's more, he puts them in an entetaining and often intriguing historical context.
This book belongs on every scientifically literate person's
reference shelf.

"Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers" is absolutely the best math book I've ever used. It explains math concepts and problems from counting and arithmatic through algebra, geometry, trigonometry, elementary annalysis and calculus in simple, easy to understand language. I have found this book to be invaluable to my own understanding of these basic mathematics, and when teaching or tutoring others. The explanations are simple and acurate.

I would recomend using this book as a course textbook for middle school, high school, and early college level math classes.

Let's put this book into perspective. At 1040ish pages, it
manages to cover the birth of numbers, algebra, geometry,
probability, differential and integral calculus including
multi-variables, trigonometry, matrices,
complex numbers, logarithms, numerical analysis, first and
second order differential equations... it goes on from there,
touching on a number of other topics. How many
textbooks is that from high school and college?

Wow. Gulberg does it with style. Brief historical anecdotes,
references to the appropriate mathematicians, proofs that are
easy to follow and understand (I found one error), clear
examples in many cases. I read this book and felt like I came
away not only with an excellent review of the key components of
these areas of math, but a better understanding of the whys
and the hows and the whatfors of applications and proofs and
where it all came from.

Maybe this book tested the limits of Dr Gulberg's mathematical
knowledge, as one reviewer suggested. Maybe not. The man was
busy doing surgery, too, and he's done a magnificent job of
putting together a book consisting of concepts that some people
never understand.

No, this book doesn't include a lot of graduate school math.
But as a review of about 14 years worth of math for me, I was
thankful I didn't have to read 10,000 pages, but only 1/10th
that much.

I think it will serve me well as a reference for when my children
are working on their homework, and it certainly has been
an entertaining review for me.

Kudos, Doc.