A K Peters, 2008. - 416 p. This unique collection contains extensive and in-depth interviews with mathematicians who have shaped the field of mathematics in the twentieth century. Collected by two mathematicians respected in the community for their skill in communicating mathematical topics to a broader audience, the book is also rich with photographs and includes an...
Princeton University Press, 2011. - 352 p. Fascinating Mathematical People is a collection of informal interviews and memoirs of sixteen prominent members of the mathematical community of the twentieth century, many still active. The candid portraits collected here demonstrate that while these men and women vary widely in terms of their backgrounds, life stories, and...
Harvard University Press, 2010. - 307 p. In the fog of a Paris dawn in 1832, Évariste Galois, the 20-year-old founder of modern algebra, was shot and killed in a duel. That gunshot, suggests Amir Alexander, marked the end of one era in mathematics and the beginning of another. Arguing that not even the purest mathematics can be separated from its cultural background, Alexander...
European Mathematical Society, 2015. — 300 p. This monograph is devoted to two distinguished mathematicians, Karel Löwner (1893–1968) and Lipman Bers (1914–1993), whose lives are dramatically interlinked with key historical events of the 20th century. K. Löwner, Professor of Mathematics at the German University in Prague (Czechoslovakia), was dismissed from his position because...
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937. — 628 p. The lives of mathematicians presented here are addressed to the general reader and to others who may wish to see what sort of human beings they were. Included are: Zeno ( 5th century B.C.), Eudoxus (408-355 B.C.), Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), Descartes (1596-1650), Poncelet (1788-1867), Gauss (1777-1855), Cauchy (1789-1856), Lobatchewsky...
N.-Y.: Chalsea, 2006. - 177 p. Although mathematical innovation stagnated in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, scholars in southern Asia and the Middle East continued to preserve the mathematical writings of the Greeks and contributed new ideas to arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, as well as astronomy and physics. The five centuries from CE 1300 to 1800...
N.-Y.: Chalsea, 2006. - 177 p. David Hilbert (1862–1943): Problems for a New Century Early Years Invariant Theory Algebraic Number Theory Geometry Mathematical Problems for the Twentieth Century Analysis and Theoretical Physics Foundations of Mathematics and the Infinite Wars and Retirement Further Reading Grace Chisholm Young (1868–1944): Mathematical Partnership Early Life...
N.-Y.: Chelsea, 2006. - 177 p. During the 16th and 17th centuries, mathematicians developed a wealth of new ideas but had not carefully employed accurate definitions, proofs, or procedures to document and implement them. However, in the early 19th century, mathematicians began to recognize the need to precisely define their terms, to logically prove even obvious principles, and...
N.-Y.: Chelsea House, 2006. - 161 p. Tracing the development of mathematics from a biographical standpoint, "Mathematics Frontiers: 1950 to the Present" profiles innovators from the second half of the 20th century who made significant discoveries in both pure and applied mathematics. From John H. Conway, who helped complete the classification of all finite groups (and invented...
Birkhäuser/Springer, 2014. - 331 p. This book traces the life of André-Louis Cholesky (1875-1918), and gives his family history. After an introduction to topography, an English translation of an unpublished paper by him where he explained his method for linear systems is given, studied and placed in its historical context. His other works, including two books, are also...
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. — 696 p. This is the first full-scale biography of Leonhard Euler (1707-83), one of the greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists of all time. In this comprehensive and authoritative account, Ronald Calinger connects the story of Euler's eventful life to the astonishing achievements that place him in the company of...
Oxford University Press, 1998. — 128 p. Charles Babbage, "the grandfather of the modern computer," did not live to see even one of his calculating machines at work. A dazzling genius with vision extending far beyond the limitations of the Victorian age, Babbage successfully calculated a table of logarithms during his years at Cambridge University, allowing mathematical...
Springer, 2003. — 668 p. Most Honourable Remembrance provides an in-depth discussion of the life and work of Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and lay mathematician who planted the seed of modern Bayesian Statistics in 1763 with his posthumous An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances . After biographical details of Bayes' ancestors,...
Princeton University Press, 1979. - 414 p. One of the greatest revolutions in mathematics occurred when Georg Cantor (1845-1918) promulgated his theory of transfinite sets. This revolution is the subject of Joseph Dauben's important studythe most thorough yet writtenof the philosopher and mathematician who was once called a "corrupter of youth" for an innovation that is now a...
Wellesley: A K Peters/CRC Press, 2005. — 361 p. This authoritative biography of Kurt Goedel relates the life of this most important logician of our time to the development of the field. Goedel's seminal achievements that changed the perception and foundations of mathematics are explained in the context of his life from the turn of the century Austria to the Institute for...
Massachusetts: A К Peters Wellesley. – 1977. – 376 p. Every biographer is confronted with certain questions whose answers depend upon the nature of the particular life to be examined: What is it that sets it apart from others and makes it worth writing about? What sources ale there to draw upon? To whom should one’s account be addressed? What should its central focus be? In the...
Cambridge University Press, 2008. - 425 p. Alfred Tarski, one of the greatest logicians of all time, is widely thought of as 'the man who defined truth'. His mathematical work on the concepts of truth and logical consequence are cornerstones of modern logic, influencing developments in philosophy, linguistics and computer science. Tarski was a charismatic teacher and zealous...
Rome, Editrice Studium. First edition(1954). 147 p. Che cosa è il calcolo infinitesimale, Explains what infinitesimal calculus is with some history, the book is in the italian language.
Springer, 2004. — 651 p. Constantin Carathéodory: Mathematics and Politics in Turbulent Times is the biography of a mathematician, born in Berlin in 1873, who became famous during his life time, but has hitherto been ignored by historians for half a century since his death in 1950, in Munich. In a thought-provoking approach, Maria Georgiadou devotes to Constantin Carathéodory...
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. — 114 p. In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved one of the world's greatest intellectual puzzles. The Poincare conjecture is an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century. In 1998, the Clay Institute in Boston named it one of seven great unsolved mathematical...
W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. - 296 p. — (Great Discoveries). — ISBN: 0-393-05169-2. Kurt Gödel is often held up as an intellectual revolutionary whose incompleteness theorem helped tear down the notion that there was anything certain about the universe. Philosophy professor, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Goldstein reinterprets the evidence and restores to Gödel's...
Springer, 2018. — 261 p. — (Springer Biographies). Zurich, summer 1912. Albert Einstein has just returned from Prague to the city on the Limmat. He sends a plea for help to his former fellow student, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936), for he is in need of assistance with the mathematical calculations of his general theory of relativity. What then follows is one of...
Oxford University Press, 1970. — 260 p. This book is intended as a study of the relations between science and philosophy during the Enlightenment as seen through the activities of one of its most prominent spokesmen, Jean d'Alembert. Thus I have not written a thoroughgoing biography or a detailed analysis of d'Alembert's scientific writings, but rather I have attempted to place...
Fourth Estate, 1998. — 302 p. Based on a National Magazine Award-winning article, this masterful biography of Hungarian-born Paul Erdos is both a vivid portrait of an eccentric genius and a layman's guide to some of this century's most startling mathematical discoveries.
Routledge, 2014. — 210 p. Twentieth-century China has been caught between a desire to increase its wealth and power in line with other advanced nations, which, by implication, means copying their institutions, practices and values, whilst simultaneously seeking to preserve China’s independence and historically formed identity. Over time, Chinese philosophers, writers, artists...
A Scientific Biography. — Berlin — Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1996. — X + 254 p.: ill. — ISBN13: 978-3-642-79835-1. This book is a comprehensive study of the life and mathematics of Walter Noll, who helped to create the mathematical tools of modern rational mechanics and thermodynamics. Noll is one of the brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. His contribution is large...
Wiley, 1997. - 432 p. A fascinating chronicle of the lives and achievements of the men and women who helped shapethe science of statistics This handsomely illustrated volume will make enthralling reading for scientists, mathematicians, and science history buffs alike. Spanning nearly four centuries, it chronicles the lives and achievements of more than 110 of the most prominent...
Translated from Russian. — Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957. — 92 p. In 1942 people in many countries marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobaehevsky, the great Russian scientist, founder of non-Euclidean geometry. This is a completely new science and although built on the old, classical geometry, the latter is no more than a...
San Rafael: Washington Square Press, 1991. — 468 p. In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realizing the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive...
Peremptory Publications, 2006. — 313 p. All students of mathematics know of Peano’s postulates for the natural numbers and his famous space-filling curve, yet their knowledge often stops there. Part of the reason is that there has not until now been a full-scale study of his life and works. This must surely be surprising, when one realizes the length of his academic career...
Princeton University Press, 2001. - 224 p. When John Nash won the Nobel prize in economics in 1994, many people were surprised to learn that he was alive and well. Since then, Sylvia Nasar's celebrated biography A Beautiful Mind, the basis of a new major motion picture, has revealed the man. The Essential John Nash reveals his work-in his own words. This book presents, for the...
Springer, 1990. - 884 p. Joseph Liouville was the most important French mathematician in the generation between Galois and Hermite. This is reflected in the fact that even today all mathematicians know at least one of the more than six theorems named after him and regularly study Liouville's Journal , as the Journal de Mathematiques pures et appliquees is usually nicknamed...
Springer, 2014. - 351 p. This is a comprehensive book on the life and works of Leon Henkin (1921–2006), an extraordinary scientist and excellent teacher whose writings became influential right from the beginning of his career with his doctoral thesis on The completeness of formal systems under the direction of Alonzo Church. Upon the invitation of Alfred Tarski, Henkin joined...
Baltomore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. — 240 p. She is best known for her curve, the witch of Agnesi, which appears in almost all high school and undergraduate math books. She was a child prodigy who frequented the salon circuit, discussing mathematics, philosophy, history, and music in multiple languages. She wrote one of the first vernacular textbooks on calculus...
Facts on File, 2005. - 308 p. It is difficult to evaluate contemporary mathematicians without the benefit of a retrospective viewpoint, separated by several decades. This comprehensive single-volume A-to-Z reference covers both the past and present scientists who have significantly contributed to the field of mathematics. Including all of the central mathematicians, as well as...
Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018. — 317 p. — ISBN: 978-3-030-01073-7. This is the first extensive biography of the influential German mathematician, Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805 – 1859). Dirichlet made major contributions to number theory in addition to clarifying concepts such as the representation of functions as series, the theory of convergence, and potential theory. His...
New York: Springer, 2010. — 343 p. From his unique perspective, renowned statistician and educator Frederick Mosteller describes many of the projects and events in his long career. From humble beginnings in western Pennsylvania to becoming the founding chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Statistics and beyond, he inspired many statisticians, scientists, and students...
New York: Dover publications, 1996. - 249 p. - ISBN: 0-486-28973-7 This Dover edition, first published in 1996, is an unabridged, unaltered republication of the work originally published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1961. Pythagoras, 582(?)-507 B.C.(?); Euclid, c.300 B.C.; and Archimedes, 287-212 B.C. Cardano, 1501-1576 Rene Descartes, 1596-1650 Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662...
Washington: The Mathematical Association of America, 2012. — 292 p. Sophie Germain, the first and only woman in history to make a substantial contribution to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, grew up during the most turbulent years of the French Revolution. Her mathematical genius was discovered by Lagrange around 1797. Published research about Germain focuses on her...
A Beautiful Mind (1998) is a biography of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. by Sylvia Nasar, professor of journalism at Columbia University. An unauthorized work, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. It inspired the 2001 film by the same name.
Birkhäuser/Springer, 2009. - 234 p. Matroid theory was invented in the middle of the 1930s by two mathematicians independently, namely, Hassler Whitney in the USA and Takeo Nakasawa in Japan. Whitney became famous, but Nakasawa remained anonymous until two decades ago. He left only four papers to the mathematical community, all of them written in the middle of the 1930s. It was...
The MIT Press, 1975. - 185 p. The colorful lives of these women, who often traveled in the most avant-garde circles of their day, are presented in fascinating detail. The obstacles and censures that were also a part of their lives are a sobering reminder of the bias against women still present in this and other fields of academic endeavor. Mathematicians, science historians,...
Springer, 2019. — 225 p. — ISBN: 978-3-030-05302-4. This biography illuminates the life of Ennio De Giorgi, a mathematical genius in parallel with John Nash, the Nobel Prize Winner and protagonist of A Beautiful Mind. Beginning with his childhood and early years of research, into his solution of the 19th problem of Hilbert and his professorship, this book pushes beyond De...
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. - 353 p. Karl Pearson, founder of modern statistics, came to this field by way of passionate early studies of philosophy and cultural history as well as ether physics and graphical geometry. His faith in science grew out of a deeply moral quest, reflected also in his socialism and his efforts to find a new basis for relations between...
Prometheus Books, 2020. — 435 p. — ISBN: 9781633885219. An entertaining history of mathematics as chronicled through fifty short biographies. Mathematics today is the fruit of centuries of brilliant insights by men and women whose personalities and life experiences were often as extraordinary as their mathematical achievements. This entertaining history of mathematics...
Springer, 1986. - 547 p. David Hilbert, Director of the Mathematical Institute of Gottingen during its glory years, is the formulator of the famous Hilbert Problems that set the course of mathematics from 1900 until the present day. In his prime, Hilbert was rivaled in influence only by the great Henri Poincare in Paris. Richard Courant was Hilbert's student and successor as...
Ebook, 2002. - 184 p. Vedic Mathematics is a system of mathematics consisting of 16 basic sanskrit concepts related to ancient Hindu Mythology which was recently discovered that enables anyone, especially those who struggle with math, to solve problems quickly and easily, often times in their head, in seconds. It uses an ancient system of mathematics discovered from palm leaves...
London, Atlantic Books. Second edition: 2006. 302 p. The author talks about the mystery of the Zeros of the Riemann zeta function. Since 1859, when the shy German mathematician Bernhard Riemann wrote an eight-page article giving a possible answer to a problem that had tormented mathematical minds for centuries, the world's greatest mathematicians have been fascinated,...
World Scientific, 2007. — 244 p. Felix Berezin was an outstanding Soviet mathematician who in the 1960s and 70s was the driving force behind the emergence of the branch of mathematics now known as supermathematics. The integral over the anticommuting Grassmann variables that he introduced in the 1960s laid the foundation for the path integral formulation of quantum field theory...
Birkhäuser/Springer, 2015. - 471 p. Bartel Leendert van der Waerden made major contributions to algebraic geometry, abstract algebra, quantum mechanics, and other fields. He liberally published on the history of mathematics. His 2-volume work Modern Algebra is one of the most influential and popular mathematical books ever written. It is therefore surprising that no monograph...
Springer, 2010. - 733 p. - Translated from Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally. Gösta Mittag-Leffler (1846–1927) played a significant role on the world stage as both a scientist and entrepreneur. Regarded as the father of Swedish mathematics, his influence extended far beyond his chosen field because of his extensive network of international contacts in science, business, and the arts....
World Scientific, 2003. - 134 p. This volume is a translation of the book Gödel , written in Japanese by Gaisi Takeuti, a distinguished proof theorist. The core of the book comprises a memoir of Kurt Gödel, Takeuti's personal recollections, and his interpretation of Gödel's attitudes towards mathematical logic. It also contains Takeuti's recollection of association with some...
A. K. Peters, 2008. — 177 p. This book, written primarily for the young adult reader, tells the life story of Emmy Noether, the most important female mathematician of our time. Because no one expected her to grow into an important scientist, the records of her early life are sketchy. After all, it was assumed that she would grow up to be a wife and mother. Instead, she was a...
Birkhäuser/Springer, 1996. - 162 p. Evariste Galois' short life was lived against the turbulent background of the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France, the 1830 revolution in Paris and the accession of Louis-Phillipe. This new and scrupulously researched biography of the founder of modern algebra sheds much light on a life led with great intensity and a death met...
Springer, 2013. - 875 p. Dirk van Dalen’s biography studies the fascinating life of the famous Dutch mathematician and philosopher Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881-1966). Brouwer belonged to a special class of genius; complex and often controversial and gifted with a deep intuition, he had an unparalleled access to the secrets and intricacies of mathematics. Most...
University of Chicago Press, 2014. - 200 p. Galileo’s Idol offers a vivid depiction of Galileo’s friend, student, and patron, Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571–1620). Sagredo’s life, which has never before been studied in depth, brings to light the inextricable relationship between the production, distribution, and reception of political information and scientific knowledge. Nick...
International Press, 1992. — 319 p. The book deals with the life and work of the great twentieth-century mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern. Included are numerous pages of photographs; an autobiographical article recounting the formation of a mathematical mind and of a great war; historical and personal reminiscences by thirty distinguished mathematicians and physicists including...
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