Numbers

Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus · Hans Hermes · Friedrich Hirzebruch · Max Koecher · Klaus Mainzer · Jürgen Neukirch · Alexander Prestel · Reinhold Remmert

dic 2012 · Graduate Texts in Mathematics Libro 123 · Springer Science & Business Media

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A book about numbers sounds rather dull. This one is not. Instead it is a lively story about one thread of mathematics-the concept of "number" told by eight authors and organized into a historical narrative that leads the reader from ancient Egypt to the late twentieth century. It is a story that begins with some of the simplest ideas of mathematics and ends with some of the most complex. It is a story that mathematicians, both amateur and professional, ought to know. Why write about numbers? Mathematicians have always found it diffi cult to develop broad perspective about their subject. While we each view our specialty as having roots in the past, and sometimes having connec tions to other specialties in the present, we seldom see the panorama of mathematical development over thousands of years. Numbers attempts to give that broad perspective, from hieroglyphs to K-theory, from Dedekind cuts to nonstandard analysis.