Further Details About This Book:
Mathematics is often presented as a large collection of disparate facts to be
absorbed (memorized!) and used only with very specific applications in
mind. Yet the development of mathematics has been a journey that has
engaged the human mind and spirit for thousands of years, offering joy,
play, and creative invention. The Pythagorean theorem, for instance,
although likely first developed for practical needs, provided great intellectual
interest to Babylonian scholars of 2000 B.C.E., who hunted for
extraordinarily large multidigit numbers satisfying the famous relation a2 +
b2 = c2. Ancient Chinese scholars took joy in arranging numbers in square
grids to create the first “magic squares,” and Renaissance scholars in
Europe sought to find a formula for the prime numbers, even though no
practical application was in mind. Each of these ideas spurred further
questions and further developments in mathematics—the general study of
Diophantine equations, semi-magic squares and Latin squares, and publickey
cryptography, for instance—again, both with and without practical
application in mind. Most every concept presented to students today has a
historical place and conceptual context that is rich and meaningful. The
aim of Facts On File’s Encyclopedia of Mathematics is to unite disparate
ideas and provide a sense of meaning and context.
Thanks to the encyclopedic format, all readers can quickly find
straightforward answers to questions that seem to trouble students and
teachers alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment