I’m very excited to announce that my new book, Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2019), is now available! (OK. It was published about a month ago, but I am just now getting around to blogging about it.) Like my previous book, Euler’s Gem (Princeton University…
Tag: history of math
Circular reasoning: who first proved that C/d is a constant?
I just uploaded an article “Circular reasoning: who first proved that is a constant?” to the arXiv. The abstract is below. It is on a topic that I’ve been thinking about and reading about off-and-on for the last year and a half. I’d be happy to hear people’s thoughts, reactions, and impressions. Abstract. We answer the…
Student podcasts in a history of mathematics course
I would like to take this opportunity to showcase some of my students’ work from last year. I taught a class called “Great Theorems and Ideas in Mathematics.” It was an upper-level history of mathematics course with a focus on some of mathematics’ greatest theorems. I used William Dunham‘s Journey Through Genius for a good…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 