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70
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
52/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Michael Brooks
Publisher:
Pantheon
Date:
January 18, 2022
A millennia-spanning history of the impact mathematics has had on the world, and the people who have mastered its inherent power, from Babylonian tax officials to the Apollo astronauts to the eccentric professor who invented the infrastructure of the online world.
What The Reviewers Say
... an alternative textbook that suggests a new way of thinking about maths, and a more congenial way of teaching it – as not simply an abstract science but as a cultural achievement, an indelible and indispensable part of human history..
... eye-opening.
... savvy.
An unabashed lover of mathematics, Brooks refuses to take the traditional pop writer’s pledge to eschew equations. Most readers will follow his description of ancient navigation across the Mediterranean and the birth of linear perspective in Renaissance Italy, but when he turns his attention to calculus, logarithms, statistics, and cryptography, there is no shortage of complex equations. Some readers will flinch, but those who power through will be rewarded.
