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Who invented algebra, and how did Newton and Leibnitz come to fight over the calculus? W. W. Rouse Ball answers in a history that generations of students have loved: Egyptians and Greeks, Arab scholars and Renaissance reckoners, then the moderns in a rush. His sixteenth chapter is a small life of Newton in itself. If you think the history of mathematics sounds dry, this book is the cure.
Ball organises his history by schools and peoples. The opening chapters cover Egyptian and Phoenician mathematics, the Ionian and Pythagorean schools, Athens and Cyzicus, and the two Alexandrian schools, where Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius made Greek geometry the wonder of the ancient world. A chapter on systems of numeration explains how counting itself was invented more than once.
The middle of the book follows the transmission: the Byzantine school, the mathematics of the Arabs who preserved and extended the Greek inheritance, its introduction into Europe, the development of arithmetic, and the Renaissance, when algebra and the new analysis were born. The modern half runs from Descartes and Huygens to a full chapter on the life and works of Newton.
Leibnitz and the eighteenth century follow, then Lagrange and Laplace and their contemporaries, and a closing chapter on the mathematics of the nineteenth century. Ball was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and his book, precise, humane, and full of lives, has taught the history of the subject to generations. Gutenberg preserves it only in TeX form; this text is set from that source.
W. W. Rouse Ball, a Cambridge mathematician, published this history in 1888, and it has never been out of the hands of readers since. In nineteen chapters he carries mathematics from Egyptian and Phoenician reckoning through the Greek schools, the Arab transmitters, and the Renaissance, to Newton, Leibnitz, Lagrange, Laplace, and the nineteenth century. Project Gutenberg keeps the book only as a TeX source; this text is set from it.
A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (1888) is W. W. Rouse Ball's classic one volume history of the subject, the book through which generations of students first met the mathematicians as people. THE CONTENTS. A Preface and a Note open the volume. Nineteen chapters follow: Egyptian and Phoenician mathematics; the Ionian and Pythagorean schools; Athens and Cyzicus; the first and second Alexandrian schools, the age of Euclid and Archimedes; the Byzantine school; systems of numeration and primitive arithmetic; the rise of learning in western Europe; the mathematics of the Arabs and its introduction into Europe; the development of arithmetic; the Renaissance and the close of the Renaissance; then the modern centuries, from Descartes to Huygens, a full chapter on the life and works of Newton, Leibnitz and the early eighteenth century, Lagrange, Laplace, and their contemporaries, and a closing chapter on the mathematics of the nineteenth century. THE BOOK AND ITS TEXT. Ball was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Project Gutenberg preserves this book only in TeX source form, and this text has been set from that source, complete in twenty eight chapters.
Edition: Project Gutenberg carries this book only as a TeX source and PDF (ebook 31246); the text shelved was set from that TeX source, the book's own nineteen chapters and preface complete. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 31246.
The first chapter
The fourth edition was stereotyped in 1908, but no material changes have been made since the issue of the second edition in 1893, other duties having, for a few years, rendered it impossible for me to find time for any extensive revision. Such revision and incorporation of recent researches on the subject have now to be postponed till the cost of printing has fallen, though advantage has been taken of reprints to make trivial corrections and additions.
W. W. R. B.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1888. Author died 1925. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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