Eugenia Cheng
Scientist In Residence, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, author of How to Bake Pi and BeyondInfinity
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Eugenia Cheng
“Professor Ian Stewart shows us emphatically that great mathematicians have often also been public servants, political activists and expositors, not just lone geniuses or one-track minds. Mathematics for all its abstraction is a communal and human activity, and this is vividly captured in this fascinating whistlestop tour of the human lives behind the greatest mathematics in history.” (from Amazon)
A celebrated mathematician traces the history of math through the lives and work of twenty-five pioneering mathematicians In Significant Figures, acclaimed mathematician Ian Stewart explores the work of 25 of history's most important mathematicians, showing how they developed on each other's work and built the mathematics we use today. Through these short biographies, we get acquainted with the history of mathematics from Archimedes to William Thurston, and learn about those too often left out of the cannon, such as Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the creator of algebra; Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer; and Emmy Noether, whose research on symmetry paved the way for modern physics. Tracing the evolution of mathematics over the course of two millennia, Significant Figures will educate and delight aspiring mathematicians and experts alike.