The first place I went to buy this was sold out! Seems somewhat amazing – perhaps they only had one copy. I found it at my favourite book store – Subiaco Bookshop.
Here’s the blurb …
Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell introduce readers to the mathematical boundary-smashers who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality.
From the brilliant Arabic scholars of the ninth-century House of Wisdom, and the pioneering African American mathematicians of the twentieth century, to the ”lady computers” around the world who revolutionised our knowledge of the night sky, we meet these fascinating trailblazers and see how they contributed to our global knowledge today.
This revisionist, completely accessible and radically inclusive history of mathematics is as entertaining as it is important.
This has a lovely style and is very easy to read. As part of my maths degree, I studied some history, but it was very western and I enjoyed the global approach in this book. I do think it is accessible and anyone with an interest in maths or history could read it.
A review