Mathematics with a story
Mathistory is a collection of chapters about where the ideas came from that we now know only as finished formulas. Behind each of them stood a real person with a real problem, and often a good deal of patience.
It is meant for everyone who wants to come back to mathematics without the stress of being tested, and for everyone who wants to understand it, not just learn it. First we ask, and only then do we calculate.
Let’s start with one of those questions:
How can you be sure it is always true, and not just in the examples?
Thales, the Pythagoreans and Euclid, ancient Greece, 6th–3rd century BCE
Mathistory tells mathematics the way it came about: first the question and the person who asked it, then the idea that answered it, and only at the very end the formula.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
How each story unfolds
-
Question
A real problem that people could not solve with the tools of their time.
-
Person
Who asked it, where they lived and why it mattered to them.
-
Idea
The insight that cracked the problem, shown the way it was first seen.
-
Formula
Only now the notation, a short record of everything that came before it.
Contents
-
How “it works” stopped being enough
-
How Mr Napier grew tired of multiplying
-
How two gentlemen argued over an unfinished game
-
How truth became a one
-
How they were born together, parted ways and met again in the computer
-
How mathematicians argued for a hundred years over a single word
-
How people stopped believing the fifth postulate
-
VIII.Visual maps
How mathematics learned to draw
About the authors
We teach mathematics, and we have noticed that students rarely struggle with the formula itself. The trouble is that the formula falls from the sky. Nobody tells them that the logarithm was once a clever trick that saved weary astronomers weeks of calculation.
Mathistory is our attempt to give every formula back its origin, through the questions, portraits, letters and documents of the people who first asked them.
Marie, Tom and Jirka