Math Through the Ages

What's new in this edition? We have added new content and also tried to make improvements to the existing material.

There are five new historical sketches, on:
- The tangent function and how it made its way into trigonometry.
- Logarithms, both decimal and natural.
- Conic sections: ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas.
- Irrational numbers.
- The derivative.

As always, each of these comes with Questions and Projects that try to address both the mathematics and the history, challenging students to go deeper into the topic.

We also worked through the whole book to improve, correct, and update. Research on the history of mathematics continues, and we have learned new things over the last ten years. Historians make mistakes, especially when they are quoting other historians, and we have tried to correct all the ones that we knew about. Many new books have been published over the last dozen years, so the bibliography has been completely updated and the notes on "what to read next" reflect the latest resources. The questions and projects have been examined and, when it seemed appropriate, revised. The Instructor's Guide was thoroughly revised as well.