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An Imaginary Tale - The Story of -1 (Paperback, Revised edition)
Loot Price: R380
Discovery Miles 3 800
You Save: R59
(13%)
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An Imaginary Tale - The Story of -1 (Paperback, Revised edition)
Series: Princeton Science Library
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List price R439
Loot Price R380
Discovery Miles 3 800
You Save R59 (13%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Today complex numbers have such widespread practical use--from
electrical engineering to aeronautics--that few people would expect
the story behind their derivation to be filled with adventure and
enigma. In An Imaginary Tale, Paul Nahin tells the 2000-year-old
history of one of mathematics' most elusive numbers, the square
root of minus one, also known as i. He recreates the baffling
mathematical problems that conjured it up, and the colorful
characters who tried to solve them. In 1878, when two brothers
stole a mathematical papyrus from the ancient Egyptian burial site
in the Valley of Kings, they led scholars to the earliest known
occurrence of the square root of a negative number. The papyrus
offered a specific numerical example of how to calculate the volume
of a truncated square pyramid, which implied the need for i. In the
first century, the mathematician-engineer Heron of Alexandria
encountered I in a separate project, but fudged the arithmetic;
medieval mathematicians stumbled upon the concept while grappling
with the meaning of negative numbers, but dismissed their square
roots as nonsense. By the time of Descartes, a theoretical use for
these elusive square roots--now called "imaginary numbers"--was
suspected, but efforts to solve them led to intense, bitter
debates. The notorious i finally won acceptance and was put to use
in complex analysis and theoretical physics in Napoleonic times.
Addressing readers with both a general and scholarly interest in
mathematics, Nahin weaves into this narrative entertaining
historical facts and mathematical discussions, including the
application of complex numbers and functions to important problems,
such as Kepler's laws of planetary motion and ac electrical
circuits. This book can be read as an engaging history, almost a
biography, of one of the most evasive and pervasive "numbers" in
all of mathematics.
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