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Title: Mathematics for the Nonmathematician by Morris Kline ISBN: 0-486-24823-2 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 February, 1985 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.45 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The only math book that can be enjoyed w/your favorite latte
Comment: This book is truly an achievement. While not intended for true practitioners, the book is entertaining while though provoking at the same time. I take it with me to my favorite coffee shop sometimes just to open it randomly and read a few pages at a time. Not only does the author weave great historical moments with the progression of mathematical thought, he covers areas such as physics, art, music, and astronomy. He has also renewed my interest in taking the subject up again after many years. I have enrolled in a course in the Calculus based on this as well as other great math books.
Rating: 3
Summary: good, but...
Comment: This book is good if you want to follow a kind of general cognitive & mental thread through world history from the Babylonians to the Greeks and from the Greeks to the present day (circa 1967?). You get a great overview of how the practice & conception of mathematics changed from each major civilization. However, as someone who has studied Classical literature & Classical languages, I can attest for a number of discrepencies that Kline makes about (especially) Greek civilization. It's almost as if everyone living in Greece at that time were thinking exactly the same things: all Greeks were rational--never mind the Eleusinian Mysteries, or the Delphic Oracle (both irrational & mystical cults). The Pythagorean cult was just as mystical as it was rational. He uses Greek art & architecture as a prime example--the Parthenon is his paragon of Greek rationality because it is presumably made of straight lines & geometric shapes. But it is obvious to anyone who has actually looked at the Parthenon that there is not one straight line on the damn thing. It's curved in every place imaginable in order to give the appearance of lightness. Granted the curvature of the base of the Parthenon models the curvature of the earth on a minor scale, but the non-linearity of the Parthenon complicates what Kline must have thought was a very simple case. I can take his mathematics seriously but I can't take the historical context very seriously when his examples are contradictory to the logic of his argument. Anyway, it's a good book which gives a good perspective about mathematics & geometry but beware of some of the proselytizing on behalf of deductive reasoning which ends up distorting the historical context.
Rating: 4
Summary: A big book about math
Comment: This book was originally written as a textbook (for a math-for-the-non-mathematician type course). It can be used as one (though as a textbook it's a bit dated), read cover-to-cover for edification and pleasure (the style is a bit more instructional than the average popular math book), or dipped into here and there for the topics the reader personally finds interesting. With well over 500 pages of fairly small print, there's a lot here, covering a wide variety of topics, with (it seems to me) particular emphasis on history, geometry (of various kinds), and applications of math to physics. If you leaf through the book, you'll find some pages of nothing but text, some pages full of geometrical diagrams, some of equations and formulas, and even a few Renaissance paintings (in the discussion on mathematical perspective). With so much here, readers will probably find some parts more interesting than others--though which parts are the interesting ones may be a matter of personal opinion.
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Title: What Is Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods by Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins, Ian Stewart ISBN: 0195105192 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1996 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: Mathematics and the Physical World by Morris Kline ISBN: 0486241041 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 March, 1981 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Concepts of Modern Mathematics by Ian Stewart ISBN: 0486284247 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 February, 1995 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Calculus : An Intuitive and Physical Approach (Second Edition) by Morris Kline ISBN: 0486404536 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 12 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics by Howard Eves ISBN: 048669609X Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 20 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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