Mathematicians

Photographs accompanied by autobiographical text written by each mathematician.

Why did Florence Nightingale introduce pie charts? How did Lewis Carroll regard Pythagoras? Who learned calculus from her nursery wallpaper? Spanning from the ancient world to the modern age, The Great Mathematicians tells fascinating and unusual tales of the men and women who transformed mathematics. We meet the mathematician who knew eight languages by the time he was 11, the one who was sent to jail for gambling and the one who published a lot yet never existed. As well as providing rich bibliographic detail, Professors Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson explain various theorems using concise and accessible language. These include the Pythagorean theorem, Gödel's Incompleteness theorem, Fermat's Last Theorem and many more. Flood and Wilson are both former presidents of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and are uniquely qualified to lay out this incredible tale. This entertaining and rigorously accurate book presents mathematics with a human face, celebrating the achievements of the greatest mathematicians across history.

Looks at the history of mathematical discoveries and the lives of great mathematicians.

Women mathematicians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and how they built professional identities in the face of social and institutional obstacles.

Although ideas from quantum physics play an important role in many parts of modern mathematics, there are few books about quantum mechanics aimed at mathematicians. This book introduces the main ideas of quantum mechanics in language familiar to mathematicians. Readers with little prior exposure to physics will enjoy the book's conversational tone as they delve into such topics as the Hilbert space approach to quantum theory; the Schrödinger equation in one space dimension; the Spectral Theorem for bounded and unbounded self-adjoint operators; the Stone–von Neumann Theorem; the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation; the role of Lie groups and Lie algebras in quantum mechanics; and the path-integral approach to quantum mechanics. The numerous exercises at the end of each chapter make the book suitable for both graduate courses and independent study. Most of the text is accessible to graduate students in mathematics who have had a first course in real analysis, covering the basics of L2 spaces and Hilbert spaces. The final chapters introduce readers who are familiar with the theory of manifolds to more advanced topics, including geometric quantization.

Moritz's 'Memorabilia Mathematica' inspired this work, but this one differs in that sources are limited to mathematicians of the 20th century. Useful to researchers to facilitate a literature search, to writers who want to emphasize or substantiate a point, and to teachers, students, and other readeres who will have their appetite for the subject whetted by the 83 quotes. -- Book News, Inc.

This vividly illustrated history of the International Congress of Mathematicians- a meeting of mathematicians from around the world held roughly every four years- acts as a visual history of the 25 congresses held between 1897 and 2006, as well as a story of changes in the culture of mathematics over the past century. Because the congress is an int