History of Number

This book is an attempt to describe the gradual development of the major schools of research on number theory in South India, Punjab, Mumbai, Bengal, and Bihar—including the establishment of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, a landmark event in the history of research of number theory in India.

This unique volume presents an ecocultural and embodied perspective on understanding numbers and their history in indigenous communities.

This book comprises five parts. The first three contain ten historical essays on important topics: number theory, calculus/analysis, and proof, respectively. Part four deals with several historically oriented courses, and Part five provides biographies of five mathematicians who played major roles in the historical events described in the first four parts of the work.

The history of continued fractions is certainly one of the longest among those of mathematical concepts, since it begins with Euclid's algorithm for the great­ est common divisor at least three centuries B.C. As it is often the case and like Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's "Ie bourgeois gentilhomme" (who was speak­ ing in prose though he did not know he was doing so), continued fractions were used for many centuries before their real discovery. The history of continued fractions and Pade approximants is also quite im­ portant, since they played a leading role in the development of some branches of mathematics.

When basic researchers started working on semiconductors during the late nineteen thirties and on integrated circuits at the end of the nineteen fifties, they did not know that their work would change the lives of future generations. Very few people at that time recognized the significance of, perhaps, the most important invention of the century. Historians have assigned the invention of integrated circuits to Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.

This book attempts to fill two gaps which exist in the standard textbooks on the History of Mathematics. One is to provide students with material that could encourage more critical thinking. General textbooks, attempting to cover three thousand years of mathematical history, must necessarily oversimplify almost everything, the practice of which can scarcely promote a critical approach to the subject. For this reason, Craig Smorynski chooses a more narrow but deeper coverage of a few select topics.