August, 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne.In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight, or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust-choked, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he’s been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a c...

A sweeping cultural history of one of the most influential mathematical books ever writtenEuclid's Elements of Geometry is one of the fountainheads of mathematics—and of culture. Written around 300 BCE, it has traveled widely across the centuries, generating countless new ideas and inspiring such figures as Isaac Newton, Bertrand Russell, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein. Encounters with Euclid tells the story of this incompar...

Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers’ marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for exploring the nature of mathematical reading and the ways in which mathematics was disseminated and assimilated across different social milieus in the early centuries of print culture. Other evidence i...

Author, astrologer, journalist, satirist, and 'well-willer to the mathematics', Poor Robin of Saffron Walden was a fantastic, yet invented, figure of British popular culture from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period. Poor Robin's Almanac first appeared in 1662, developing an enthusiastic following and long outliving its original creator to last until 1828. Benjamin Wardhaugh tells the great story of Georgian popular mathematics - through Poor Robin's remarkable life, ...

This is the second volume in a two-part set on the writings of Thomas Salmon. Salmon (1647-1706) is remembered today for the fury with which Matthew Locke greeted his first foray into musical writing, the Essay to the Advancement of Musick (1672), and the near-farcical level to which the subsequent pamphlet dispute quickly descended. Salmon proposed a radical reform of musical notation, involving a new set of clefs which he claimed, and Locke denied, would make learning and performing musi...

This book contains all the letters that are known to survive from the correspondence of Charles Hutton (1737-1823). Hutton was one of the most prominent British mathematicians of his generation; he played roles at the Royal Society, the Royal Military Academy, the Board of Longitude, the 'philomath' network and elsewhere. He worked on the explosive force of gunpowder and the mean density of the earth, wining the Royal Society's Copley medal in 1778; he was also at the focus of a celebrated...

An entertaining and informative anthology of popular math writing from the Renaissance to cyberspaceDespite what we may sometimes imagine, popular mathematics writing didn't begin with Martin Gardner. In fact, it has a rich tradition stretching back hundreds of years. This entertaining and enlightening antholog—the first of its kind—gathers nearly one hundred fascinating selections from the past 500 years of popular math writing, bringing to life a little-known sid...

Techniques for deciphering texts by early mathematiciansWritings by early mathematicians feature language and notations that are quite different from what we're familiar with today. Sourcebooks on the history of mathematics provide some guidance, but what has been lacking is a guide tailored to the needs of readers approaching these writings for the first time. How to Read Historical Mathematics fills this gap by introducing readers to the analytical quest...

How, in 1705, was Thomas Salmon, a parson from Bedfordshire, able to persuade the Royal Society that a musical performance could constitute a scientific experiment? Or that the judgement of a musical audience could provide evidence for a mathematically precise theory of musical tuning? This book presents answers to these questions. It constitutes a general history of quantitative music theory in the late seventeenth century as well as a detailed study of one part of that history: namely th...

John Birchensha (c.1605-?1681) is chiefly remembered for the impression that his theories about music made on the mathematicians, natural philosophers and virtuosi of the Royal Society in the 1660s and 1670s, and for inventing a system that he claimed would enable even those without practical experience of music to learn to compose in a short time by means of 'a few easy, certain, and perfect Rules'-his most famous composition pupil being Samuel Pepys in 1662. His great aim was to publish ...

August, 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne.In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight, or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust-choked, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he’s been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a c...

Why did Florence Nightingale introduce pie charts? How did Lewis Carroll regard Pythagoras? Who learned calculus from her nursery wallpaper?Spanning from the ancient world to the modern age, The Great Mathematicians tells fascinating and unusual tales of the men and women who transformed mathematics. We meet the mathematician who knew eight languages by the time he was 11, the one who was sent to jail for gambling and the one who published a lot yet never ...