“HIGHER Mathematics,” edited by Mansfield Merriman and Robert S. Woodward, is a text-book for classical and engineering colleges, and is a work containing 600 pages. Each chapter is written by a ...

Around 1900 B.C., a student in the Sumerian city of Nippur, in what’s now Iraq, copied a multiplication table onto a clay tablet. Some 4,000 years later, that schoolwork survives, as do the student’s ...

IT is only during the last fifty or sixty years that the history of mathematics has been systematically studied. In that time, however, the field has been gradually covered by an increasing number of ...

In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although ...