Routes of Learning: Highways, Pathways, and Byways in the History of Mathematics - Hardcover

Grattan-Guinness, Ivor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801892473 ISBN 13: 9780801892479

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009

Synopsis

This seminal collection gathers together many general writings of one of the world's leading historians of mathematics. Organized thematically, these essays ponder the intellectual underpinnings of the field, examine the major topics in the history of mathematics, and recount the bizarre history of pseudomath.

Ivor Grattan-Guinness explores how people understand mathematics―the routes of learning they take as they make important discoveries and study mathematical concepts and theories. The essays in the first part of the book discuss the history of mathematics as a field and its central philosophical issues. Those in the next part address the history of mathematics education and its importance to current modes of teaching. In the last section Grattan-Guinness investigates various understudied aspects of math, including numerology, Masonic symbols in classical music, and the links between mathematics and Christianity.

This collection includes several essays that are difficult to find anywhere else. All historians of mathematics and students of the field will want a copy of this remarkable resource on their bookshelves.

About this title

About the Author:

Ivor Grattan-Guinness is a professor emeritus of the history of mathematics and logic at Middlesex University. He is author of Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800–1840: From the Calculus and Mechanics to Mathematical Analysis and Mathematical Physics and editor of the Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Review:

"Ivor Grattan-Guinness has been a leader in the field for decades. His ideas are at times contentious, which is all the more reason to have them all together in one volume. There is nothing else available like this, because there is no other researcher like Grattan-Guinness. This volume is a must for math historians, math philosophers, and all collegiate libraries."

(Amy Shell-Gellasch, editor of From Calculus to Computers: Using the Last 200 Years of Mathematics History in the Classroom)

"Here, Grattan-Guinness, one of the world's leading mathematics historians, has written the seminal how-to-book for the history of mathematics... This reviewer found the book hard to put down."

(Choice)

"In spite of the great variation in themes, the book is quite coherent and gives anyone dealing with the history of mathematics food for thought."

(Teun Koetsier History and Philosophy of Logic)

"This book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in mathematical history and education, while the wide-ranging bibliographies for each chapter provide a valuable guide for further reading."

(Paul Taylor Mathematics Today)

"A good contribution to the literature on the field by its wealth of resources. Readers can get in touch with diverse and many lines of scientific thought and ideas."

(Gilda de La Rocque Palis ZDM: The International Journal on Mathematics Education)

"A useful introduction into the field of history of mathematics."

(Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze Archives Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences)

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0801892473
• ISBN 13: 9780801892479
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 392