The Great Mathematicians

Raymond Flood · Robin Wilson

sept 2011 · Arcturus Publishing

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Mathematics pervades our daily lives. It is intimately involved whenever one starts a car, switches on the television, flies on a plane, forecasts the weather, books a holiday on the internet, programmes a computer, navigates heavy traffic, analyses statistical data, or seeks a cure for a disease. Our credit cards and the nation's defence secrets are kept secure by encryption methods based on prime numbers.

This book presents mathematics with a human face, celebrating the achievements of the great mathematicians in their historical context. Here you will meet time-measurers (the Mayans, Huygens), astronomers (Ptolemy, Halley), logicians (Aristotle, Russell), calculators (Napier, Babbage), geometers (Archimedes, Bolyai) and arithmeticians (Pythagoras, al-Khwarizmi), as well as such well-known figures as Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Wren, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale, and many more.

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Raymond Flood is an emeritus fellow and former vice president of Kellogg College, Oxford and was previously university lecturer in computing studies and mathematics at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University. His main research interests lie in statistics and the history of mathematics, and he was formerly president of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. He is a co-editor of The Nature of Time, Let Newton be!, Möbius and his Band, Oxford Figures, Music and Mathematics: from Pythagoras to Fractals, and Kelvin: Life, Labours and Legacy.

Robin Wilson is an emeritus professor of pure mathematics at the Open University, emeritus professor of geometry at Gresham College, London, and a former fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He currently teaches at Pembroke College, Oxford, and is president elect of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. He is involved with the popularization and communication of mathematics and its history, and has written and edited many books on the subject, including Lewis Carroll in Numberland and Four Colours Suffice. In 2005 he was awarded a Pólya prize by the Mathematical Association of America for 'outstanding expository writing'.