The Story of Mathematics

The Story of Mathematics is a book about the history of mathematics written by Anne Rooney and published on.

Personal

I own a paperback. I probably bought it in the discount section of a book store. I read it shortly after buying it and liked it. Wanting to create a page for it in this Wiki, I reread.

Review

Good

• The book is fully illustrated.
• The book starts with pre-number systems like tick marks, and talks about various early counting systems like Roman Numerals and base-5, 12 and 60 systems, and the Chinese multiplicative system, before finally getting to the Hindu-Qrabic system. This is a great introduction to teaching how numbers are a something humans had to invent rather than be actual things. It also talks about early versions of zero before finally getting the true placeholder, and negative numbers, and fractions.
• I like how it discusses how early cultures don't have words for big numbers, and, when they do, they're cumbersome.

Bad

• The magazine layout with lots of sidebars makes it very difficult to read.

Ugly

• Nothing.