E - ISBN: 0691058547 - ZIN: 10194102


Sign In	\|			Cart	\|	Wish List	\|	Help

Checkout Now »


	0 Items

100% Safe and Private!

Search

for:

Browse All Topics New Releases Coming Soon

All Topics > Science > Mathematics > History

All orders
shipped by
airmail!

Click here for our
Shipping Policies!


		"I've always followed my father's advice: he told me, first to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody unintentionally. If I insult you, you can be goddamn sure I intend to. And, third, he told me not to go around looking for trouble." - John Wayne

	E
	by Eli Maor, Eli Maor

ZIN Product Number: 10194102

eBay (last 12 months)
Auctions:		38
Price Range:		$0.05 - 0.07

Craigslist (last 12 months)
Classifieds:		23
Price Range:		$0.08 - 0.04

Amazon Used (last 12 months)
Auctions:		72
Price Range:		$0.07 - 0.05

ZooScape (last 12 months)
Auctions:		0
Price Range:		N/A


Google listings (non-affiliate)		99
MSN listings (non-affiliate)		27
Yahoo listings (non-affiliate)		52

Product Details

Format: Paperback, 232 pages

Publisher: Princeton University Press

ISBN: 0691058547

Release Date: Jan 4, 2002

Average Reader Review:

(Based on 4 reviews.)

In Brief
This is the history of the number which is the base for natural logarithms from the work of John Napier in seventeenth-century Scotland through the nineteenth century. Bibliography. Index.

From The Publisher
The story of [pi] has been told many times, both in scholarly works and in popular books. But its close relative, the number e, has fared less well: despite the central role it plays in mathematics, its history has never before been written for a general audience. The present work fills this gap. Geared to the reader with only a modest background in mathematics, the book describes the story of e from a human as well as a mathematical perspective. In a sense, it is the story of an entire period in the history of mathematics, from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, with the invention of calculus at its center. Many of the players who took part in this story are here brought to life. Among them are John Napier, the eccentric religious activist who invented logarithms and - unknowingly - came within a hair's breadth of discovering e; William Oughtred, the inventor of the slide rule, who lived a frugal and unhealthful life and died at the age of 86, reportedly of joy when hearing of the restoration of King Charles II to the throne of England; Newton and his bitter priority dispute with Leibniz over the invention of the calculus, a conflict that impeded British mathematics for more than a century; and Jacob Bernoulli, who asked that a logarithmic spiral be engraved on his tombstone - but a linear spiral was engraved instead! The unifying theme throughout the book is the idea that a single number can tie together so many different aspects of mathematics - from the law of compound interest to the shape of a hanging chain, from the area under a hyperbola to Euler's famous formula e[superscript i[pi]] = -1, from the inner structure of a nautilus shell to Bach's equal-tempered scale and to the art of M. C. Escher. The book ends with an account of the discovery of transcendental numbers, an event that paved the way for Cantor's revolutionary ideas about infinity. No knowledge of calculus is assumed, and the few places where calculus is used are fully exp

Number of Reviews: 4 Average Rating:

Remarkable!

-- A reviewer, a 22-year old mathematician, April 17, 2000

Remarkable!

-- A reviewer, a 22-year old mathematician, April 17, 2000

This books dispels the mystery of 'e'

-- Satheesh Makkapati, engineer, March 7, 2000

This books dispels the mystery of 'e'

-- Satheesh Makkapati, engineer, March 7, 2000

The Reader's Catalog
"Maor wonderfully tells the story of e. The chronological history allows excursions into the lives of people involved with the development of this fascinating number. Maor hangs this story on a string of people stretching from Archimedes to David Hilbert. And by presenting mathematics in terms of the humans who produced it, he places the subject where it belongs--squarely in the centre of the humanities"--Nature

	Preface
1	John Napier, 1614	3
2	Recognition	11
3	Financial Matters	23
4	To the Limit, If It Exists	28
5	Forefathers of the Calculus	40
6	Prelude to Breakthrough	49
7	Squaring the Hyperbola	58
8	The Birth of a New Science	70
9	The Great Controversy	83
10	e[superscript x]: The Function That Equals its Own Derivative	98
11	e[superscript theta]: Spira Mirabilis	114
12	(e[superscript x] + e[superscript -x])/2: The Hanging Chain	140
13	e[superscript ix]: "The Most Famous of All Formulas"	153
14	e[superscript x + iy]: The Imaginary Becomes Real	164
15	But What Kind of Number Is It?	183
	App. 1. Some Additional Remarks on Napier's Logarithms	195
	App. 2. The Existence of lim (1 + 1/n)[superscript n] as n [approaches] [infinity]	197
	App. 3. A Heuristic Derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus	200
	App. 4. The Inverse Relation between lim (b[superscript h] - 1)/h = 1 and lim (1 + h)[superscript 1/h] = b as h [approaches] 0	202
	App. 5. An Alternative Definition of the Logarithmic Function	203
	App. 6. Two Properties of the Logarithmic Spiral	205
	App. 7. Interpretation of the Parameter [phi] in the Hyperbolic Functions	208
	App. 8. e to One Hundred Decimal Places	211
	Bibliography	213
	Index	217

Find similiar books in these subject areas:

All Topics > Science > Mathematics > History
All Topics > Science > Mathematics > Pure Mathematics > Number Theory

People like you also bought:

To Infinity and Beyond, by Eli Maor

The Joy of Pi, by David Blatner

Trigonometric Delights, by Eli Maor

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife

History of PI, by Peter Beckmann

An Imaginary Tale: The Story of the Square Root of Minus One, by Paul J. Nahin

Keywords
e (The number), e (The number), Science/Mathematics, History Of Mathematics, Mathematics, Number Theory, History & Philosophy