Number Theory and Geometry through History

Omtale

Developed from a course on the history of mathematics, the book is aimed at school teachers of mathematics who need to learn more about mathematics than its history, and in a way they can communicate to middle and high school students. The author hopes to overcome, through these teachers using this book, math phobia among these students. The book develops an appreciation mathematics by not only looking at the work of individual, including Euclid, Euler, Gauss, etc. but also how mathematics developed from ancient civilizations. Brahmins (Hindu priests) devised our current decimal number system now adopted throughout the world. The concept of limit, which is what calculus is all about, was not alien to ancient civilizations as Archimedes used a method similar to the Riemann sums to compute the surface area and volume of the sphere. No theorem is here cited in a proof that has not been proved earlier in the book. There are some exceptions when it comes to the frontier of current research. Appreciating mathematics requires more than thoughtlessly reciting first the ten by ten, then twenty by twenty multiplication tables. Many find this approach fails to develop an appreciation for the subject. The author was once one of those students. Here he exposes how he found joy in studying mathematics, and how developed a life-long interest in it he hopes to share. The book is suitable for high school teachers, as a textbook for undergraduate students and their instructors. It is a fun book for advanced readership interested in mathematics.