Significant Figures: Lives and Works of Trailblazing Mathematicians - Hardcover

Stewart, Professor Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178125429X ISBN 13: 9781781254295

Publisher: Profile Books, 2017

Synopsis

Which mathematician elaborated a crucial concept the night before he died in a duel? Who funded his maths and medical career through gambling and chess? Who learned maths from her wallpaper?

Ian Stewart presents the extraordinary lives and amazing discoveries of twenty-five of history's greatest mathematicians from Archimedes and Liu Hui to Benoit Mandelbrot and William Thurston. His subjects are the inspiring individuals from all over the world who have made crucial contributions to mathematics. They include the rediscovered geniuses Srinivasa Ramanujan and Emmy Noether, alongside the towering figures of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (inventor of the algorithm), Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Bernhard Reimann (precursor to Einstein), Henri Poincaré, Ada Lovelace (arguably the first computer programmer), Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

Ian Stewart's vivid accounts are fascinating in themselves and, taken together, cohere into a riveting history of key steps in the development of mathematics.

About this edition

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 178125429X
• ISBN 13: 9781781254295
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320