An understanding of developments in Arabic mathematics between the IXth and XVth century is vital to a full appreciation of the history of classical mathematics. This book draws together more than ten studies to highlight one of the major developments in Arabic mathematical thinking, provoked by the double fecondation between arithmetic and the algebra of al-Khwarizmi, which led to the foundation of diverse chapters of mathematics: polynomial algebra, combinatorial analysis, algebraic geometry, algebraic theory of numbers, diophantine analysis and numerical calculus. Thanks to epistemological analysis, and the discovery of hitherto unknown material, the author has brought these chapters into the light, proposes another periodization for classical mathematics, and questions current ideology in writing its history. Since the publication of the French version of these studies and of this book, its main results have been admitted by historians of Arabic mathematics, and integrated into their recent publications. This book is already a vital reference for anyone seeking to understand history of Arabic mathematics, and its contribution to Latin as well as to later mathematics. The English translation will be of particular value to historians and philosophers of mathematics and of science.

This volume is, as may be readily apparent, the fruit of many years' labor in archives and libraries, unearthing rare books, researching Nachlasse, and above all, systematic comparative analysis of fecund sources. The work not only demanded much time in preparation, but was also interrupted by other duties, such as time spent as a guest professor at universities abroad, which of course provided welcome opportunities to present and discuss the work, and in particular, the organizing of the 1994 International Grassmann Conference and the subsequent editing of its proceedings. If it is not possible to be precise about the amount of time spent on this work, it is possible to be precise about the date of its inception. In 1984, during research in the archive of the Ecole polytechnique, my attention was drawn to the way in which the massive rupture that took place in 1811-precipitating the change back to the synthetic method and replacing the limit method by the method of the quantites infiniment petites-significantly altered the teaching of analysis at this first modern institution of higher education, an institution originally founded as a citadel of the analytic method."

This volume in the Synthese Library Series is the result of a con- ference held at the Roskilde University, Denmark, September 16- 18, 1998. The purpose of this meeting was to shed light on some of the recent issues in probability theory and track their history; to analyze their philosophical and mathematical significance, and to analyze the role of mathematical probability theory in other sciences. Hence the conference was called Probability Theory- Philosophy! Recent History and Relations to Science. The editors would like to thank the invited speakers includ- ing in alphabetical order Prof. N.H. Bingham (BruneI Univer- sity), Prof. Berna KIlmc; (Bogazici University), Prof. Eberhard Knoblock (Techniche Universitat Berlin), Prof. J.B. Paris (Uni- versity of Manchester), Prof. T. Seidenfeld (Carnegie Mellon University), Prof. Glenn Shafer (Rutgers University) and Prof. Volodya Vovk (University of London) for contributing, in the most lucid and encouraging way, to the fulfillment of the con- ference aim. The editors are also grateful to the invited speakers for making their contributions available for publication. The conference was organized by the Danish Network on the History and Philosophy of Mathematics http://mmf.ruc.dkjmathnetj The editors would like to thank the network's organizing com- mittee consisting of Prof. Kirsti Andersen (University of Aarhus), Prof. Jesper Liitzen (University of Copenhagen), Dr. Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen (Roskilde University) and the committee's secretaries Lise Mariane Jeppesen and Jesper Thrane (Roskilde University).

What gives statistics its unity as a science? Stephen Stigler sets forth the seven foundational ideas of statistics-a scientific discipline related to but distinct from mathematics and computer science. Even the most basic idea-aggregation, exemplified by averaging-is counterintuitive. It allows one to gain information by discarding information, namely, the individuality of the observations. Stigler's second pillar, information measurement, challenges the importance of "big data" by noting that observations are not all equally important: the amount of information in a data set is often proportional to only the square root of the number of observations, not the absolute number. The third idea is likelihood, the calibration of inferences with the use of probability. Intercomparison is the principle that statistical comparisons do not need to be made with respect to an external standard. The fifth pillar is regression, both a paradox (tall parents on average produce shorter children; tall children on average have shorter parents) and the basis of inference, including Bayesian inference and causal reasoning. The sixth concept captures the importance of experimental design-for example, by recognizing the gains to be had from a combinatorial approach with rigorous randomization. The seventh idea is the residual: the notion that a complicated phenomenon can be simplified by subtracting the effect of known causes, leaving a residual phenomenon that can be explained more easily. The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom presents an original, unified account of statistical science that will fascinate the interested layperson and engage the professional statistician.

The present anthology has its origin in two international conferences that were arranged at Uppsala University in August 2004: "Logicism, Intuitionism and F- malism: What has become of them?" followed by "Symposium on Constructive Mathematics." The rst conference concerned the three major programmes in the foundations of mathematics during the classical period from Frege's Begrif- schrift in 1879 to the publication of Godel' ] s two incompleteness theorems in 1931: The logicism of Frege, Russell and Whitehead, the intuitionism of Brouwer, and Hilbert's formalist and proof-theoretic programme. The main purpose of the conf- ence was to assess the relevance of these foundational programmes to contemporary philosophy of mathematics. The second conference was announced as a satellite event to the rst, and was speci cally concerned with constructive mathematics-an activebranchofmathematicswheremathematicalstatements-existencestatements in particular-are interpreted in terms of what can be effectively constructed. C- structive mathematics may also be characterized as mathematics based on intuiti- isticlogicand, thus, beviewedasadirectdescendant ofBrouwer'sintuitionism. The two conferences were successful in bringing together a number of internationally renowned mathematicians and philosophers around common concerns. Once again it was con rmed that philosophers and mathematicians can work together and that real progress in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics is possible only if they do. Most of the papers in this collection originate from the two conferences, but a few additional papers of relevance to the issues discussed at the Uppsala c- ferences have been solicited especially for this volume."

We live in a space, we get about in it. We also quantify it, we think of it as having dimensions. Ever since Euclid's ancient geometry, we have thought of bodies occupying parts of this space (including our own bodies), the space of our practical orientations (our 'moving abouts'), as having three dimensions. Bodies have volume specified by measures of length, breadth and height. But how do we know that the space we live in has just these three dimensions? It is theoreti cally possible that some spaces might exist that are not correctly described by Euclidean geometry. After all, there are the non Euclidian geometries, descriptions of spaces not conforming to the axioms and theorems of Euclid's geometry. As one might expect, there is a history of philosophers' attempts to 'prove' that space is three-dimensional. The present volume surveys these attempts from Aristotle, through Leibniz and Kant, to more recent philosophy. As you will learn, the historical theories are rife with terminology, with language, already tainted by the as sumed, but by no means obvious, clarity of terms like 'dimension', 'line', 'point' and others. Prior to that language there are actions, ways of getting around in the world, building things, being interested in things, in the more specific case of dimensionality, cutting things. It is to these actions that we must eventually appeal if we are to understand how science is grounded."

The subject of the book is the development of physics in the 18th century centered upon the fundamental contributions of Leonhard Euler to physics and mathematics. This is the first book devoted to Euler as a physicist. Classical mechanics are reconstructed in terms of the program initiated by Euler in 1736 and its completion over the following decades until 1760. The book examines how Euler coordinated his progress in mathematics with his progress in physics.

This book reflects the progress made in the forty years since the appearance of Abraham Robinson 's revolutionary book Nonstandard Analysis in the foundations of mathematics and logic, number theory, statistics and probability, in ordinary, partial and stochastic differential equations and in education. The contributions are clear and essentially self-contained.

The famous and prolific nineteenth-century mathematician, engineer and inventor Charles Babbage (1791 1871) was an early pioneer of computing. He planned several calculating machines, but none was built in his lifetime. On his death his youngest son, Henry P. Babbage, was charged with the task of completing an unfinished volume of papers on the machines, which was finally published in 1889 and is reissued here. The papers, by a variety of authors, were collected from journals including The Philosophical Magazine, The Edinburgh Review and Scientific Memoirs. They relate to the construction and potential application of Charles Babbage's calculating engines, notably the Difference Engine and the more complex Analytical Engine, which was to be programmed using punched cards. The book also includes correspondence with members of scientific societies, as well as proceedings, catalogues and drawings. Included is a complete catalogue of the drawings of the Analytical Engine.

This is a charming collection of essays on life and science, by one of the leading mathematicians of our day. Vladimir Igorevich Arnold is renowned for his achievements in mathematics, and nearly as famous for his informal teaching style, and for the clarity and accessibility of his writing. The chapter headings convey Arnold's humor and restless imagination. A few examples: My first recollections; The combinatorics of Plutarch; The topology of surfaces according to Alexander of Macedon; Catching a pike in Cambridge. Yesterday and Long Ago offers a rare opportunity to appreciate the life and work of one of the world's outstanding living mathematicians.

The ancient Greeks played a fundamental role in the history of mathematics and their ideas were reused and developed in subsequent periods all the way down to the scientific revolution and beyond. In this, the first complete history for a century. Reviel Netz offers a panoramic view of the rise and influence of Greek mathematics and its significance in world history. He explores the Near Eastern antecedents and the social and intellectual developments underlying the subject's beginnings in Greece in the fifth century BCE. He leads the reader through the proofs and arguments of key figures like Archytas, Euclid and Archimedes, and considers the totality of the Greek mathematical achievement which also includes, in addition to pure mathematics, such applied fields as optics, music, mechanics and, above all, astronomy. This is the story not only of a major historical development, but of some of the finest mathematics ever created.

This fifth volume of A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics is complemented by four preceding volumes which focused on the main chapters of classical mathematics: infinitesimal geometry, theory of conics and its applications, spherical geometry, mathematical astronomy, etc. This book includes seven main works of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) and of two of his predecessors, Thabit ibn Qurra and al-Sijzi: The circle, its transformations and its properties; Analysis and synthesis: the founding of analytical art; A new mathematical discipline: the Knowns; The geometrisation of place; Analysis and synthesis: examples of the geometry of triangles; Axiomatic method and invention: Thabit ibn Qurra; The idea of an Ars Inveniendi: al-Sijzi. Including extensive commentary from one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, this fundamental text is essential reading for historians and mathematicians at the most advanced levels of research.

Paul Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdos would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he'd move on to the next place, the next solution. Hoffman's book, like Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius's life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdos's brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia. Erdos never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sacks writes of Erdos: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life."The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It's hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons," from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdos over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdos is no doubt missed. --Therese Littleton

WILEY-INTERSCIENCE PAPERBACK SERIES

The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists.

From the Reviews of History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750

"This is a marvelous book . . . Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of statistics, or in understanding how modern ideas have developed, will find this an invaluable resource."
–Short Book Reviews of ISI

A few years ago, in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, I came across a remarkable but then little-known album of pencil and watercolour portraits. The artist of most (perhaps all) was Thomas Charles Wageman. Created during 1829-1852, these portraits are of pupils of the famous mat- matical tutor William Hopkins. Though I knew much about several of the subjects, the names of others were then unknown to me. I was prompted to discover more about them all, and gradually this interest evolved into the present book. The project has expanded naturally to describe the Cambridge educational milieu of the time, the work of William Hopkins, and the later achievements of his pupils and their contemporaries. As I have taught applied mathematics in a British university for forty years, during a time of rapid change, the struggles to implement and to resist reform in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge struck a chord of recognition. So, too, did debates about academic standards of honours degrees. And my own experiences, as a graduate of a Scottish university who proceeded to C- bridge for postgraduate work, gave me a particular interest in those Scots and Irish students who did much the same more than a hundred years earlier. As a mathematician, I sometimes felt frustrated at having to suppress virtually all of the ? ne mathematics associated with this period: but to have included such technical material would have made this a very different book.

In this sequel to his award-winning How Mathematics Happened, physicist Peter S. Rudman explores the history of mathematics among the Babylonians and Egyptians, showing how their scribes in the era from 2000 to 1600 BCE used visualizations of how plane geometric figures could be partitioned into squares, rectangles, and right triangles to invent geometric algebra, even solving problems that we now do by quadratic algebra. Using illustrations adapted from both Babylonian cuneiform tablets and Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, Rudman traces the evolution of mathematics from the metric geometric algebra of Babylon and Egypt--which used numeric quantities on diagrams as a means to work out problems--to the nonmetric geometric algebra of Euclid (ca. 300 BCE). Thus, Rudman traces the evolution of calculations of square roots from Egypt and Babylon to India, and then to Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Ptolemy. Surprisingly, the best calculation was by a Babylonian scribe who calculated the square root of two to seven decimal-digit precision. Rudman provocatively asks, and then interestingly conjectures, why such a precise calculation was made in a mud-brick culture. From his analysis of Babylonian geometric algebra, Rudman formulates a "Babylonian Theorem," which he shows was used to derive the Pythagorean Theorem, about a millennium before its purported discovery by Pythagoras.
He also concludes that what enabled the Greek mathematicians to surpass their predecessors was the insertion of alphabetic notation onto geometric figures. Such symbolic notation was natural for users of an alphabetic language, but was impossible for the Babylonians and Egyptians, whose writing systems (cuneiform and hieroglyphics, respectively) were not alphabetic. Rudman intersperses his discussions of early math conundrums and solutions with "Fun Questions" for those who enjoy recreational math and wish to test their understanding. The Babylonian Theorem is a masterful, fascinating, and entertaining book, which will interest both math enthusiasts and students of history.

Such Silver Currents is the first biography of a mathematical genius and his literary wife, their wide circle of well-known intellectual and artistic friends, and through them of the age in which they lived. William Clifford is now recognised not only for his innovative and lasting mathematics, but also for his philosophy, which embraced the fundamentals of scientific thought, the nature of the physical universe, Darwinian theory, the nature of consciousness, personal morality and law, and the whole mystery of being. Clifford algebra is seen as the basis for Dirac's theory of the electron, fundamental to modern physics, and Clifford also anticipated Einstein's idea that space is curved. The book includes a personal reflection on William Clifford's mathematics by the Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose O.M. The year after his election to the Royal Society, Clifford married Lucy Lane, the journalist and novelist. During their four years of marriage they held Sunday salons attended by many well-known scientific, literary and artistic personalities. Following William's early death, Lucy became a close friend and confidante of Henry James. Her wide circle of friends included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Thomas Huxley, Sir Frederick Macmillan and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Die Mathematik im mittelalterlichen Islam hatte gro en Einfluss auf die allgemeine Entwicklung des Faches. Der Autor beschreibt diese Periode der Geschichte der Mathematik und bezieht sich dabei auf die arabischsprachigen Quellen. Zu den behandelten Themen geh ren Dezimalrechnen, Geometrie, ebene und sph rische Trigonometrie, Algebra sowie die Approximation von Wurzeln von Gleichungen. Das Buch wendet sich an Mathematikhistoriker und -studenten, aber auch an alle Interessierten mit Mathematikkenntnissen der weiterf hrenden Schule.

Invention -that single leap of a human mind that gives us all we create. Yet we make a mistake when we call a telephone or a light bulb an invention, says John Lienhard. In truth, light bulbs, airplanes, steam engines-these objects are the end results, the fruits, of vast aggregates of invention. They are not invention itself. In How Invention Begins, Lienhard reconciles the ends of invention with the individual leaps upon which they are built, illuminating the vast web of individual inspirations that lie behind whole technologies. He traces, for instance, the way in which thousands of people applied their combined inventive genius to airplanes, railroad engines, and automobiles. As he does so, it becomes clear that a collective desire, an upwelling of fascination, a spirit of the times-a Zeitgeist -laid its hold upon inventors. The thing they all sought to create was speed itself. Likewise, Lienhard shows that when we trace the astonishingly complex technology of printing books, we come at last to that which we desire from books-the knowledge, the learning, that they provide. Can we speak of speed or education as inventions? To do so, he concludes, is certainly no greater a stretch than it is to call radio or the telephone an "invention." Throughout this marvelous volume, Lienhard illuminates these processes, these webs of insight or inspiration, by weaving a fabric of anecdote, history, and technical detail-all of which come together to provide a full and satisfying portrait of the true nature of invention.

This volume offers insights into the development of mathematical logic over the last century. Arising from a special session of the history of logic at an American Mathematical Society meeting, the chapters explore technical innovations, the philosophical consequences of work during the period, and the historical and social context in which the logicians worked. The discussions herein will appeal to mathematical logicians and historians of mathematics, as well as philosophers and historians of science.

The name of Bernard Riemann is well known to mathematicians and physicists around the world. His name is indelibly stamped on the literature of mathematics and physics. This remarkable work, rich in insight and scholarship, is addressed to mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers interested in mathematics. It seeks to draw those readers closer to the underlying ideas of Riemann 's work and to the development of them in their historical context. This illuminating English-language version of the original German edition will be an important contribution to the literature of the history of mathematics.