Recommendations from our site
“Reading the book was the first time I understood properly what calculus was about, by reading how it was developed, step by step. What they have managed to do is to give mathematics a narrative history that can be understood by non-mathematicians, and this requires a lot of skill. There’s a wonderful phrase they use at some point in the book: ‘Mathematics is a relay’. They bring out very fluently the ways in which the baton is passed on.” Read more...
The 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Charles Tripp, Political Scientist
“I can also highly recommend a book about the history of math, The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & its Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell. I love global history and mathematics is a really interesting lens to look at it through. Early on, we learn that we should perhaps not be calling it Pythagoras’ theorem, but the Gugou Theorem, as it had been earlier proved in China. Notable in the book is the extent to which similar concepts were discovered independently around the world.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
