In the 17th century, the great scientist and mathematician Galileo Galilei noted that the book of nature "cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is not humanly possible to understand a single word of it." For at least 4,000 years of recorded history, humans have engaged in the study of mathematics. Our progress in this field is a gripping narrative, a never-ending search for hidden patterns in numbers, a philosopher's quest for the ultimate meaning of mathematical relationships, a chronicle of amazing progress in practical fields like engineering and economics, a tale of astonishing scientific discoveries, a fantastic voyage into realms of abstract beauty, and a series of fascinating personal profiles of individuals such as:
- Archimedes, the greatest of all Greek mathematicians, who met his death in 212 B.C. at the hands of a Roman soldier while he was engrossed in a problem
- Evariste Galois, whose stormy life in 19th-century radical French politics was cut short by a duel at age 20—but not before he laid the foundations for a new branch of modern algebra called Galois theory
- Srinivasa Ramanujan, an impoverished college dropout in India who sent his extraordinary equations to the famous English mathematician G. H. Hardy in 1913 and was subsequently recognized as a genius
An inquiring mind is all you need to embark on this supreme intellectual adventure in The Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics, which contains 24 illuminating lectures taught by award-winning Professor of Mathematics David M. Bressoud. Mathematics has exhibited an inexhaustible power to illuminate aspects of the universe that have been cloaked in mystery. In charting the storied history of its evolution, The Queen of the Sciences not only illustrates how these mysteries were revealed but exposes, with a wealth of insight, the enormous efforts that went into deciphering our natural world.
