The heritage of Thales. (Q4499074)

These are notes for a course in the History of Mathematics and a few topics of historical importance that are not usually taught in undergraduate courses. The book has two parts. Part one, with 31 chapters, is a selective survey of mathematics from its beginnings to the middle of the eighteenth century. \{Since the book is concerned with the philosophy of mathematics, one would have expected a discussion of the disastrous influence of Aristotelian philosophy on Western thought. Aristotle postulated ``straight and curved'' as a pair of original opposites. This was taken to mean that straight segments are insufficient to measure curved objects. The falsity of this position was shown only by Wallis in his proof that a ``horned angle'' (between a curve and its tangent) is of magnitude zero.\} A good point of this section is an elementary proof of the impossibility of the solution of the classical cubic problems with ruler and compass. The second part, 35 chapters, deals selectively with numbers, generalizations of the number concept, transfinite numbers, symbolic logic and theory of computability, and category theory. It is quite impossible to give a reasonable treatment of all these subjects in such a slim volume; most of the proofs are hints. The theory of quaternions is not based on Hamilton's approach [that for any rotation \(R\) in three-space and vectors \(a,b,R(ab)=R(a)R(b)]\) but (without attribution) on the matrix approach first developed by Cayley and Laguerre. (No mention of octonions and Clifford numbers or the fact that vector analysis is a watered down version of quaternion analysis). In the chapter on Cardinal Numbers it is stated that \textit{G. Cantor} ``found it impossible to get a decent job'', but in fact he obtained a full professorship at Halle in 1879.