Overview

"A new history of mathematics focusing on the marginalized voices who propelled the discipline, spanning six continents and thousands of years of untold stories We think we know the story of math: A bearded old Greek guy named Pythagoras dreamed up his theorem. Another bearded old Greek guy named Euclid filled in the rest of the gaps--boom, geometry. After that, nothing too important happened for a couple thousand years--it was the Dark Ages after all. Then, a white English guy named Isaac Newton got clunked on the head by an apple, and voila, we had calculus. A French white guy named Fermat gave us one of the toughest theorems to prove, until an English white guy cracked it a few hundred years later. An American white guy, John Nash, blessed us with game theory. Sensing a theme here? This is not the whole story--not even close. The Secret Lives of Numbers makes the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than the narrative we think we know. Our story takes us from Hypatia, the first great female mathematician, whose ideas revolutionized geometry and who was killed for them--to Karen Uhlenbeck, the first woman to win the Abel Prize, ""math's Nobel."" Along the way we travel the globe to meet the brilliant Arabic scholars of the ""House of Wisdom,"" a math temple whose destruction in the Siege of Baghdad in the thirteenth century was a loss arguably on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; Madhava of Sangamagrama, the fourteenth-century Indian genius who uncovered the central tenets of calculus 300 years before Isaac Newton was born; and the Black mathematicians of the Civil Rights era, who played a significant role in dismantling some of the early data-based methods of racial discrimination. Covering thousands of years, six continents--sorry, Antarctica--and just about every mathematical discipline, The Secret Lives of Numbers is an immensely compelling narrative history, a book that aims to inspire the next generation of mathematicians and scientists and show that math is for everyone."

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"""Mathematics is the most powerful tool humans ever invented, and this book is a welcome corrective to our understanding of how it came to be."" -- ""Booklist (starred review)"""

Author Information

Kate Kitagawa is one of the world's leading experts on the history of mathematics. She has taught at the University of Oxford and Harvard University and held research positions at UC Berkeley, University of Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute. She is currently Director of the Space Education Office (Space Education Center) at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Dr Timothy Revell is a journalist and lapsed mathematician. He is currently the Deputy US Editor for New Scientist and is based in New York. As a reporter and editor, he specialises in technology and mathematics, covering everything from artificial intelligence to the Abel prize. He has a master's degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. in computer science. His first book was Man vs. Maths.

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