Its a good "general intrest" math book, but nothing more.

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	• Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers Jan Gullberg W. W. Norton & Company, 1997 - 1093 pages average customer review:based on 62 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Impressive Overview of Mathematics

Let's put this book into perspective. At 1040ish pages, it
manages to cover the birth of numbers, algebra, geometry,
probability, differential and integral calculus including
multi-variables, trigonometry, matrices,
complex numbers, logarithms, numerical analysis, first and
second order differential equations... it goes on from there,
touching on a number of other topics. How many
textbooks is that from high school and college?

Wow. Gulberg does it with style. Brief historical anecdotes,
references to the appropriate mathematicians, proofs that are
easy to follow and understand (I found one error), clear
examples in many cases. I read this book and felt like I came
away not only with an excellent review of the key components of
these areas of math, but a better understanding of the whys
and the hows and the whatfors of applications and proofs and
where it all came from.

Maybe this book tested the limits of Dr Gulberg's mathematical
knowledge, as one reviewer suggested. Maybe not. The man was
busy doing surgery, too, and he's done a magnificent job of
putting together a book consisting of concepts that some people
never understand.

No, this book doesn't include a lot of graduate school math.
But as a review of about 14 years worth of math for me, I was
thankful I didn't have to read 10,000 pages, but only 1/10th
that much.

I think it will serve me well as a reference for when my children
are working on their homework, and it certainly has been
an entertaining review for me.

Kudos, Doc.

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All of Math in One Fat Book

Gulberg develops mathematics within its historical context, which is something I rarely find in math books today.

Starting with the invention of numbers and proceeding through the arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, the book has something for everyone.

It's hard to believe that Gullberg was a surgeon by training. Gullberg took 10 years to create this book. Sadly, Gullberg died at age 62 in 1998. Fortunately, he lived long enough to see the publication of this great book.

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Recommended for students

As a college student studying mathematics, I found this book to be very helpful. This book explains the history, proves formulas, number puzzles, entertains readers and etc. I can't imagine what I'd do without it.

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Its a good "general intrest" math book, but nothing more.

I purchased this book while in high school, and I felt it was an intresting book as a general refrence and trivia about mathematics history. I attempted (as I remember) to read the book cover to cover but only got about half way through. It did serve as an occasional (but mostly never) reference in some of my early college math courses like differential equations and multi-variable calculus.

However, with respect to coverage of more intresting (perhaps more 'modern' mathematics), there is virtually none (lest we call elementary linear algebra 'modern'). I do not think it would be appropriate as a refrence for any college courses beyond the aformentioned introductary levels, but again, it serves its purpose more for the pre-college/general audience individaul. I do not agree that if you have had no exposure to calculus that this book would be all to terribly difficult.

The first half of the book can be understood with knowledge up to school trig/analysis course. Of course, you will probably not learn the material either, but it is indeed possible (at least in my opinion) that the general 'gist' of the material can be comprehended with school knowledge of mathematics.

Overall, I would have preferred that they would have covered logic/proofs and axiomitized systems more in the book as these aspects have much more to do with the development of math (and especially the modern incarnations of algerba and analysis), further the true beauty in mathematics lies in the logic and proofs. Instead the author dives into topics such as a survey of specific types of trigonometeric mappings (I felt the sections on trig and conics were a bit excessive relative to other topics in mathematics that were just brushed upon or ignored entirely).

Yet, for the price, and for the expected audience, the book defintilly more then gives the reader his/her moneys worth. It is indeed full of many illustrations and background history on the various topics of school mathematics and should serve the reader well as a way to enligthen themselves of the topic of mathematics.

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Numbers, numbers, everywhere...

Jan Gullberg describes his impulse to write this book as deriving from conversations with his son, who was studying engineering. Gullberg himself was not a mathematician, but rather a surgeon of international standing; mathematics became a hobby of his, an intellectual pursuit with practical applications that he could share with his son. This thick book (nearly 1100 pages) has over a thousand drawings, which were prepared by Gullberg's son, Par.

This book can be classified in many ways. In one sense, it is a giant book of mathematics trivia - almost every major and minor aspect of mathematics is represented here in some fashion, from the explanation of cardinal and ordinal numbers to the analytic geometry, calculus, probability and statistics, and symbolic logic. These are arranged in a fairly standard progression, one that most people who have studied mathematics in school will recognise, at least up to the point that they studied.

Another classification of the book can be that of a mathematics encyclopedia. The table of contents, supplemented with the name index and the subject index in the back of the book, makes this a ready reference for short descriptions.

There are fun pieces here - for example, Gullberg derives approximate values for pi in two different scriptural texts (a passage from Kings and a passage from Nehemiah); there are mathematical jokes (yes, there are such things) and puzzles, some of which have only been recently solved (Fermat's last theorem, for example). There are historical pieces and purely mathematical pieces here, and in general the reader will learn about mathematics even when one doesn't understand fully the information being presented.

This is the one drawback of the book - it is not a mathematics textbook. It does not set problems to be solved, but rather presents the theory and ideas, which, if one is not already familiar with them, one will have difficulty learning them for the first time here. There are some pieces that will seem familiar from prior schooling, and no doubt a number of things that will simply make logical sense, but for those who have not had differential or integral calculus, for example, the explanations here will likely make sense in the general philosophy behind the ideas (the two are essentially opposite forms of the same problems) but the actual mathematical operations will not be so comprehensible.

This is not to say that the mathematically illiterate need be intimidated by this book - the good thing about this text is that it does have something for everyone regardless of mathematical proficiency, and can enlighten and entertain people from those who live for numbers to those who run from them at top speed.

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