A Curious History of Mathematics: The Big Ideas from Primitive Numbers to Chaos Theory - Softcover

Mathematics opens new doors to the amazing world of maths. Telling the exciting story from a historical perspective, it shows how mathematical science advanced through the discoveries of the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks, the great scholars of medieval Islam and Europe, and the Renaissance and the birth of the Scientific Revolution. From the simplest concepts of numbers and arithmetic, geometry and algebra, trigonometry and calculus, right through to infinity and chaos theory, Mathematics introduces and explains the most important concepts in accessible, non-technical language. Along the way we meet the extraordinary characters who made great leaps in our understanding of mathematical concepts and theorems, from Pythagoras and Archimedes, to Fibonacci and Fermat, Godel and Turing.

Joel Levy is a writer and journalist specialising in science, nature and technology for younger audiences. His writing explores both mainstream science and weird technology, from chemistry and physics to death-rays and biomimetic robots. After taking degrees in molecular biology and psychology at Warwick and Edinburgh, he has gone on to write books including Really Useful, the science and history of everyday technology; Poison: A Social history, on the science and lore of poisons; Newton's Notebooks, on the life and discoveries of Isaac Newton; Phobiapedia, an encyclopaedia of the things that scare us most; and A Bee in a Cathedral, exploring analogies and thought experiments in science, nature and technology.