History of Mathematics (eBook)

This book attempts to fill two gaps which exist in the standard textbooks on the History of Mathematics. One is to provide the students with material that could encourage more critical thinking. General textbooks, attempting to cover three thousand or so years of mathematical history, must necessarily oversimplify just about everything, the practice of which can scarcely promote a critical approach to the subject. For this, a more narrow but deeper coverage of a few select topics is called for. The second aim is to include the proofs of important results which are typically neglected in the modern history of mathematics curriculum. The most obvious of these is the oft-cited necessity of introducing complex numbers in applying the algebraic solution of cubic equations. This solution, though it is now relegated to courses in the History of Mathematics, was a major occurrence in history. It was the first substantial piece of mathematics in Europe that was not a mere extension of what the Greeks had done and thus signified the coming of age of European mathematics. The fact that the solution, in the case of three distinct real roots to a cubic, necessarily involved complex numbers both made inevitable the acceptance and study of these numbers and provided a stimulus for the development of numerical approximation methods.

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1 An Initial Assignment I haven't taught the history of mathematics that often, but I do rather like the course. The chief drawbacks to teaching it are that i. it is a lot more work than teaching a regular mathematics course, and ii. in American colleges at least, the students taking the course are not mathematics majors but e- cation majors- and and in the past I had found education majors to be somewhat weak and unmotivated. The last time I taught the course, however, themajorityofthestudentsweregraduateeducationstudentsworkingtoward their master's degrees. I decided to challenge them right from the start: 1 Assignment. In An Outline of Set Theory, James Henle wrote about mat- matics: Every now and then it must pause to organize and re?ect on what it is and where it comes from. This happened in the sixth century B. C. when Euclid thought he had derived most of the mathematical results known at the time from ?ve postulates. Do a little research to ?nd as many errors as possible in the second sentence and write a short essay on them. Theresponsesfarexceededmyexpectations. Tobesure,someoftheund- graduates found the assignment unclear: I did not say how many errors they 2 were supposed to ?nd. But many of the students put their hearts and souls 1 MyapologiestoProf. Henle,atwhoseexpenseIpreviouslyhadalittlefunonthis matter. I used it again not because of any animosity I hold for him, but because I was familiar with it and, dealing with Euclid, it seemed appropriate for the start of my course.