|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
1 Review
|
Average Customer Review
Share your thoughts with other customers
Create your own review
|
|
Most Helpful First | Newest First
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Symbols, Impossible Numbers, and Geometric Entanglements,
By Sam Adams (Minnesota. USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Symbols, Impossible Numbers, and Geometric Entanglements: British Algebra through the Commentaries on Newton's Universal Arithmetick (Hardcover)
The author begins her introduction with the words: "As a history of algebra in England and Scotland from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, this book considers not only technical algebra but also the personal, philosophical, religious, and institutional factors that affected the introduction, elaboration, and reception of the subject." (p. 1)
The following algebra texts are discussed in this book: Girolamo Cardano - The Great Art (Ars magna) - 1545 Francois Viete - Introduction to the Analytic Art - 1591 William Oughtred - The Key of the Mathematicks - 1631, 1647 Thomas Harriot - Praxis (Artis analyticae praxis) - 1631 Rene Descartes - Geometrie - 1637 Johann Rahn w/John Pell - Algebra - 1659, 1668 John Kersey - Algebra - 1673 John Wallis - Treatise of Algebra - 1685 Isaac Newton - Universal Arithmetick - 1707 Nicholas Saunderson - Elements of Algebra - 1740 Colin MacLaurin - Treatise of Algebra - 1748 The author also discusses views concerning algebra or mathematics by Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Barrow, and George Berkeley. The main concerns and disagreements seem to have been around the status (epistemological, ontological, or otherwise) of negative and imaginary numbers, as well as the relative standings of geometry and algebra within the realm of mathematics. A reader wishing to know how algebra was presented within these various texts - in other words, what the algebra textbooks of the period looked like, what notation was used, how proofs were presented, what topics were included, and so forth - will need to look elsewhere. The author's main concern seems to be the controversies surrounding negative and imaginary numbers and the struggle of algebra to find respectability in the face of geometry. The following books are available from amazon. Cardano - The Rules of Algebra: (Ars Magna) Viete- The Analytic Art Thomas Harriot - Artis Analyticae Praxis: An English Translation with Commentary Descartes - Geometry For a look at what algebra was going to become in England during the early nineteenth century, see Thomas Peacock's 1830 Treatise on Algebra - Treatise on Algebra, Volume I: Arithmetical Algebra A Treatise on Algebra, Volume II: On Symbolical Algebra, and Its Applications to the Geometry of Position A century later, in 1930, B. L. Van Der Waerden published the enormously influential: Algebra: Volume I Algebra, Volume II And then in 1941, Garrett Birkhoff and Saunders Mac Lane published: A Survey of Modern Algebra |
|
Most Helpful First | Newest First
|
|
Symbols, Impossible Numbers, and Geometric Entanglements: British Algebra through the Commentaries on Newton's Universal Arithmetick by Helena M. Pycior (Paperback - Nov. 2006)
$69.00
In Stock | |
 
| ||
