Lost Treasure
Apr. 25th, 2019 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowWhen I teach History of Math, there are three points where I recommend specific books to my students.
When I discuss the solution of the general cubic and quartic equations by a quintet of Italian mathematicians, I mention the work of some of their non-European predecessors, including (of all people) Omar Khayyam. He was a very good mathematician, as well as being a fine poet. At that point I recommend the Rubaiyat, because everybody should read the Rubaiyat at least once. (Yes, I know that it's as much Fitzgerald as it is Khayyam, but everybody should still read it.)
When I get to Christiaan Huygens, I discuss (among other things) his work on horology, and recommend Dava Sobel's _Longitude_. It's only tangentially related, but it's a wonderful little book.
And when I hit the eighteenth century and the great Leonhard Euler, among the things I discuss is his delightful polyhedron formula V - E + F = 2, and I recommend David Richeson's _Euler's Gem_, which is the best single-topic work on the history of math that I've ever read.
Monday, after class, one of my students told me he'd gotten hold of the book via Interlibrary Loan, and was enjoying it so far. He told me that there was only one circulating copy in the system; SIUE's library keeps a copy in Special Collections, but you can't take it out of the room. The book is only available on Amazon through independent dealers (although there is a Kindle edition). Shame about that; it's just a wonderful book, and accessible to anyone with any familiarity with college-level math. (Calculus will do.)
When I discuss the solution of the general cubic and quartic equations by a quintet of Italian mathematicians, I mention the work of some of their non-European predecessors, including (of all people) Omar Khayyam. He was a very good mathematician, as well as being a fine poet. At that point I recommend the Rubaiyat, because everybody should read the Rubaiyat at least once. (Yes, I know that it's as much Fitzgerald as it is Khayyam, but everybody should still read it.)
When I get to Christiaan Huygens, I discuss (among other things) his work on horology, and recommend Dava Sobel's _Longitude_. It's only tangentially related, but it's a wonderful little book.
And when I hit the eighteenth century and the great Leonhard Euler, among the things I discuss is his delightful polyhedron formula V - E + F = 2, and I recommend David Richeson's _Euler's Gem_, which is the best single-topic work on the history of math that I've ever read.
Monday, after class, one of my students told me he'd gotten hold of the book via Interlibrary Loan, and was enjoying it so far. He told me that there was only one circulating copy in the system; SIUE's library keeps a copy in Special Collections, but you can't take it out of the room. The book is only available on Amazon through independent dealers (although there is a Kindle edition). Shame about that; it's just a wonderful book, and accessible to anyone with any familiarity with college-level math. (Calculus will do.)
