No comments about Mathematics - The Music of Reason.

1 comments about Machine Cryptography and Modern Cryptanalysis (Artech House Telecom Library).

1. As with a great many books, the title of this book promises more than it delivers. However, it is well worth reading if one is seriously interested in cryptology or the history of cryptology.

   Most of the machine ciphers of World War II, and many of the machine ciphers used for a very long time thereafter, derived in one way or another from the ciphers invented by Hebern and Hegelin. For example, the German Enigma was derived from Hebern's approach by Willi Korn, and the American M-209 from Hegelin's approach. The list of machines and designers using one or the other of these two methods would be very long indeed. Alan Konheim's excellent 1981 book "Cryptography: A Primer" deals only very briefly with ciphers of these imortant and widespread types; Deavours and Kruh fill this gap.

   "Machine Cryptography and Modern Cryptanalysis" offers a great deal of information on the strengths and weaknesses of these machines, and on the cryptanalytic methods used for attacking such ciphers. It does not discuss a number of other techniques of cryptography, such as NDES and public key ciphers. But what it does discuss is very valuable. Anyone who studies it carefully will wind up equipped to break a wide variety of widely used ciphers.

   I would give this book an even more enthusiastic review if it weren't for a problem the authors allude to in the introduction: "The book is incomplete, as it must be. The totality of what happened is buried in a thousand classified documents which will never be made public." Well, that's true, but what's also true is that this book fails to discuss some important stuff on its topic that can be found in unclassified but unpublished documents, at least some of which I feel confident that Deavours was familiar with in 1985, when this book was written. One has to stop somewhere when writing a book; Deavours and Kruh probably made a wise choice about what not to include. But I hope that some day in the near future Deavours (or somebody) will be able to update this book by adding some of what Deavours and Kruh left out.

No comments about The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478-1776: From Commercial Arithmetic to Life Annuities and Joint Stocks.

No comments about Numerical Methods for Image Registration (Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computation).

No comments about Mathematics and Culture II: Visual Perfection: Mathematics and Creativity.

5 comments about The Story Of Mathematics.

1. Like Story of Astronomy, Story of Mathematics is a very interesting and readable voyage through 2000+ years of history. The book focuses on the characters who developed mathematics rather than on the mathematics itself. The book is very sturdily constructed and will last a long time. Finally, for any reader who read my review of Astronomy, where I hinted that I liked that book better than Mathematics,I have to say after finishing Mathematics that I liked it even better than Astronomy. OK, so I changed my mind. I'm now working on Story of Physics and will report on it as soon as I'm finished.



2. I love this book. I learn from story telling. I understand any subject matter better if I know its history, culture and reason for existence. The story of mathematics is such book. It helps me to overcome math anxiety and make the subject, dare I say it, cool. Read it and rid your math phobia forever.



3. A wonderful inquiry into the evolution of mathematics from the counting needs of yesterday to the position of advanced tool in any and every subject of human enterprise. This book brings out fascinating insights into how we have come to inherit the mathematics ...from the masters who have lived before .. It also illustrates in a subtle manner that we are lucky to live in an age where mathematics learning and teaching has become extermely organised... The stories of the individuals who have contrubuted to this subject should spur anyone to greater good..Beg borrow or steal ..but read this book



4. This book provides a good sense of the scope of mathematics and particularly how the development of mathematics and physics converge and diverge. However, the book is frustrating at times. Sometimes the book focuses on the history of an idea and sometimes it focuses on the chronology of events. There's a backwards-forwards motion in the book that I did not like. I read it closely but still found it hard to keep my bearing. Many books that try to provide an historical overview suffer from this, so I gave this book a four. There is definitely good content here. As a "read", I'd give it a three.



5. The book is an excellent history of mathematics and mathematicians. However, the authors show a great deal of prejudice and religious discrimination throughout the book. There is almost no mentioning of how Arab and Muslim mathematicians have contributed to the advancement of mathematics. It is not a matter of theory that Muslim mathematicians have added an incredible volume of new ideas and findings to the field of mathematics and physics. Their theories and contributions have swept Europe and their books are still used as references to the great eras of mathematical discovery.

   It is sad to see good scholars who just cannot get over their racist tendencies and try to be objective and honest. The authors started with the era of the Greek mathematicians, spent a great deal of time elaborating on the life and discoveries of each Greek mathematician, and then made a historical jump to 16th century Europe. They passed through the Muslim or Islamic time as if it never existed!! They pretended as if the discoveries of the Greeks were just known to Newton and his contemporaries by way of some accident and that the Muslim scholars had nothing to do with translating, correcting, clarifying, extending the theories of the Greeks.

   The authors were too reluctant to mention the contributions of Muslim mathematicians even when these contributions were original and new. In the realm of Algebra and number theory, for example, where the names of Muslim mathematicians are well known in the mathematics world, the authors were content enough to write a one-line sentence about these great contributors to the theory of mathematics.

   Racists seem to have no special attributes. They range from uneducated people to those who claim to have studied and pondered the world of mathematics.

4 comments about An Introduction to the History of Mathematics (The Saunders Series).

1. This book is quite informative and interesting to read. If you love any math at all, you should definitally read it.



2. When used as a self-study text, I found the book to be lacking a sufficient quantity of example problems solved in adequate detail to be truly helpful.



3. The careful documentation of the discoveries and history of mathematics is of overwhelming importance, especially in modern times where the advances are taking place so rapidly that the historical roots of some branches of mathematics seem to be getting lost. It would be a tragedy if the history of these important developments were not put into print so that later generations of mathematicians and students could have an understanding of how these came about. Thanks to the information age, the accessibility of mathematical documents has dramatically increased, but these documents usually do not include overviews of how the ideas took root and then flourished as independent research disciplines.

   This book gives a general overview of mathematical developments up until the middle of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating story, and readers will realize to what extent mathematical ideas deemed complex by even modern standards were known by the ancients. Indeed, it is very surprising to learn that in 2000 BC the Babylonians were solving quadratic equations and even some cubic and quartic equations. The Babylonians did not produce an Evariste Galois, that took centuries more time, but they were dealing with mathematical constructions that were interesting to compare with modern methods.

   One very interesting feature of this book is that it is meant to be used as a textbook, and not just in a course in the history of mathematics. The author has included "problem studies" and "essay topics" at the end of each chapter that challenge the reader to solve problems pertinent to the historical topics of each chapter. The inclusion of these problems will allow the student to gain insight on the difficulty in solving problems with the constraint of using concepts that were unique to a definite period in mathematical history.

   The book also includes discussions of the history of non-Western contributions to mathematics. The work of the Hindus, the Chinese, and Arabs is included. The contributions of the Arabs are particularly important for later developments in the West, as it was they who revived Greek philosophy and mathematics and consequently changed dramatically the role of mathematics in Europe.

   The reading of this book will give a greater appreciation of the developments in mathematics as they are done today. Mathematical research now is done by both human and machine, and no doubt this century, and others beyond it, will result in brilliant developments. Mathematics pervades every human activity in the modern world and every piece of technology. When books like this one are written in the future, readers who peruse them and take note of the incredible advancements made in mathematics in the centuries that preceed them, no doubt their predominant emotion will be astonishment.




4. I agree with the person who said this book is very informative & it is also easy to read. I learned lots from doing the problems too, like for example, a simple algorithm on how to construct magic squares of odd size. This book was good for the course I did because there's only so much you can do in a course; Morris Kline's "Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times" is twice as long as this one so it goes into much more detail, but too much for a 1-term course. This book by Eves is a good INTRO to the history of math, I liked it.

No comments about Orthogonality and Spacetime Geometry (Universitext).

No comments about From Fermat to Minkowski: Lectures on the Theory of Numbers and Its Historical Development (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics).

No comments about An Introduction to the Theory of Value on the Lines of Menger, Wieser, and Böhm-Bawerk.