By Jacqueline Stedall
Oxford University Press
Paperback: £7.99 $11.95
What a wonderful surprise. I was going to review another book before this one but it wasn’t to my liking (actually it was pretty bad) and I gave up after the first few chapters. So I settled instead on this book, mainly because it is short, or “very short” as the subtitle suggests.
Seeing that it was part of a series, I was expecting a typical history starting with Pythagoras and Euclid, then Newton and possibly Leibniz, Euler, Gauss and Riemann, followed by a collection of moderns, depending on how much space was left. I looked in the (excellent) index at the back (opening Q–Z) and was surprised to find no entry for Riemann. Was this British bias? No, Hardy was missing as well – but instead there were other people who I’d never heard of: William Oughtred, for example, (author of the first maths book published in Oxford) and Etienne d’Espagnet (who supplied Fermat with essential earlier works). Samuel Pepys also makes an appearance but more as an example of how little maths educated people knew in the 17th century.
I learnt in this charming book that what I had been expecting is called the “stepping stone” approach to the history of mathematics, focusing on elite mathematicians. This book is refreshingly different. It is actually more about the subject “history of mathematics”, i.e. about how we compile and recount a history of mathematics rather than about a sequence of events. However, it does this by focusing on intriguing stories that show the various features that must be considered. In doing so, it fills in the water between the stepping stones, for example, in the story of Fermat’s last theorem. It also tells the story of the majority of people who actually do maths – schoolchildren – by discussing the class work in a Babylonian classroom (around 1850 BC), as well as in a Cumbrian classroom around 1800.
After reading this “preview version”, I am now going to get the “director’s cut” – The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, which is co-authored by the same author with Eleanor Robson.
Happy reading and exploring!
