English Math History

Math 101: A History of Numbers isn’t a textbook — it’s a story. A fast, listenable, journey through how we went from counting on our fingers to coding AI. From ancient bone tallies and Sumerian tokens to Renaissance ratios, algebraic revolutions, and modern machine logic, this book tracks the true evolution of math — not as cold formulas, but as a living system we built to make sense of the world.

This 10-part history of mathematics reveals the personalities behind the calculations: the passions and rivalries of mathematicians struggling to get their ideas heard. Professor Marcus du Sautoy shows how these masters of abstraction find a role in the real world and proves that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science.

A new history of mathematics focusing on the marginalized voices who propelled the discipline, spanning six continents and thousands of years of untold stories. ""A book to make you love math."" —Financial Times Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the...

From ancient circles to modern supercomputers — the story of the world’s most mysterious number. 🔵 Discover the origins of Pi in ancient Egypt and Babylon — where geometry met mythology. ⚙️ Meet Archimedes, the genius who first calculated Pi with remarkable precision using polygons. 📜 Travel through history as Pi journeys from Greece to India, China, and the Islamic Golden Age. 🧮 Explore breakthroughs from Renaissance mathematicians and the birth of calculus. 💻 See how computers joined the race to calculate Pi to billions — now trillions — of digits. 🎂 Celebrate...

The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile...

From Oxford's leading AI researcher comes a fun and accessible tour through the history and future of one of the most cutting edge and misunderstood field in science: Artificial Intelligence The somewhat ill-defined long-term aim of AI is to build machines that are conscious, self-aware, and...

Math has a reputation for being inaccessible. People think that it requires a special gift or that comprehension is a matter of genes. Yet, the greatest mathematicians throughout history, from Rene Descartes to Alexander Grothendieck, have insisted that this is not the case.

Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: Observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria.

The Wall Street Journal's award-winning business reporter unveils the bizarre and sinister story of how a math genius named Tom Hayes, a handful of outrageous confederates, and a deeply corrupt banking system ignited one of the greatest financial scandals in history. In 2006, an oddball group of...

Geneticist Adam Rutherford and mathematician Hannah Fry guide listeners through time and space, through our bodies and brains, showing how emotions shape our view of reality, how our minds tell us lies, and why a mostly bald and curious ape decided to begin poking at the fabric of the universe.

Unravel the fascinating story of mathematics in Journey Through the Ages: A Captivating History of Mathematics by Haselton Media Group. This captivating narrative traces the evolution of numbers and logic from ancient counting under starlit skies to the algorithms powering today’s world. Spanning millennia and continents, the book explores how practical needs—tallying sheep, surveying flooded Nile lands, or charting celestial maps—sparked intellectual leaps, from Mesopotamian clay tablets to Greek proofs, Islamic algebra, and the European Renaissance’s calculus revolution.Crafted ...

At a time when almost a third of US States have restricted or limited the teaching of Black History and African American Studies, this book provides a crucial guide for parents and educators alike. A sustainable curiosity and enthusiasm for lifelong learning can be easily inspired through simple, practical exercises which connect math and science to real-world issues your children confront in their everyday lives. By integrating these lessons with interdisciplinary learning from fictional literature, non-fictional biographies, even movies and games, children are guided toward a deeper ...

"A gripping guide to the modern taming of the infinite." —New York Times Part history, part philosophy, part love letter to the study of mathematics, Everything and More is an illuminating tour of infinity. With his infectious curiosity and trademark verbal pyrotechnics, David Foster Wallace...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The groundbreaking exploration of probability and uncertainty that explains how to make better predictions in a world drowning in data, from the nation’s foremost political forecaster—updated with insights into the pandemic, journalism today, and polling One of...

An undocumented activist and a social scientist come together to tally of the structural costs of undocumented life An inhumane math pervades this country: even as our government extracts labor and often taxes from undocumented workers, it excludes these same workers from its social safety net...

One of the world's great mathematicians shows why math is the ultimate timesaver—and how everyone can make their lives easier with a few simple shortcuts. We are often told that hard work is the key to success. But success isn’t about hard work – it’s about shortcuts...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." —The Wall Street Journal One of our greatest scientists—and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants—gives us a work of visionary importance that...

Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot.

From the back rooms of New York City’s age-old magic societies to cutting-edge psychology labs, three-card monte games on Canal Street to glossy Las Vegas casinos, Fooling Houdini recounts Alex Stone’s quest to join the ranks of master magicians. As he navigates this quirky and occasionally...

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.