NUMBER. THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, the Best
Review: I searched through many many many history of mathematics books and I finally found the ONE. Not just history, but primarily philosophy of mathematics. The brilliant thing about this book is that he tells the story around the most interesting about thing about mathematics: infinity. There are very VERY few people who can actually write a book that follows the natural wonder one goes through in their discovery. Dantzig can do this. Another of his books 'Aspects of Science' is also good. Just read the quote from Einstein on the cover.

Rating:
Summary: A Master Work
Review: I'm sending this book to my daughter, the doctor, who has expressed a desire to know something about the intellectual history of mathematics. I can't believe there is only one review! I have read this book three times; I may read it yet again before I die. Rather than list all its attributes, I suggest to the reader that s/he think of an attribute, and assume I gave I praise it to the limit of my ability!

Rating:
Summary: A Master Work
Review: I'm sending this book to my daughter, the doctor, who has expressed a desire to know something about the intellectual history of mathematics. I can't believe there is only one review! I have read this book three times; I may read it yet again before I die. Rather than list all its attributes, I suggest to the reader that s/he think of an attribute, and assume I gave I praise it to the limit of my ability!

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece Almost Forgotten
Review: This is a book hardly read in our times of "modern math" (we are living in a museum of great innovations!) and that shows the theory of numbers as a human activity, stressing the fundamental role of the intuition in the construction of the mathematics. It seems to me that the gradual forgetfulness of this kind of book is one of the important causes for the continuous decline in the number of interested (and interesting!) people in the field of mathematics. I recommend this reading. You'll find a lot of fun!

Rating:
Summary: Background information you should know...
Review: Tobias Dantzig was the father of George Dantzig, the great operations Research scientist in 20th century.

Tobias was born in Russia, but went to France where he studied mathematics in Paris being taught there by Poincar¨¦. At this time Tobias met Anja who was at the Sorbonne at this time also studying mathematics. They married and emigrated to the United States, settling in Oregon. Tobias believed that his strong Russian accent would prevent him from obtaining jobs other than as a labourer, and at first his jobs included that of lumberjack, road builder and painter. It was into this very poor family that George was born.

Tobias and Anja chose names for their children hoping that these would influence their future careers. George was named "George Bernard" after George Bernard Shaw since his parents hoped their first child would become a writer. Similarly George's younger brother was named Henry after Henri Poincar¨¦, and he did indeed become a mathematician. Tobias was fortunate to gain the chance of reading for a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Indiana, while Anja obtained a Master's degree in French becoming a linguist at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

The family were now living in Washington D.C., and there George attended Powell Junior High School where his progress in mathematics was, at first, rather poor. Encouraged by his father, and determined to do well in mathematics and science, he soon began to obtain top marks in mathematics. This continued at Central High School where he became fascinated by geometry. By this time he was getting strong support from three people: an outstanding mathematics teacher at the High School, a school friend who would go on to become a professor of mathematics at Berkeley, and his father. George later wrote that his father:-

... gave me thousands of geometry problems while I was still in high school. ... the mental exercise required to solve them was the great gift from my father. The solving of thousands of problems during my high school days - at the time when my brain was growing - did more than anything else to develop my analytic power.

Tobias was working on his most famous work Number: the language of science in the late 1920s and George helped him. He later wrote:-

As a teenager, I prepared some of the figures that appeared in the book.

The book was published in 1930 and when it was reprinted in the 1970s a reviewer wrote:-

Since its first appearance nearly half a century ago the book has gone through a number of printings and has deservedly maintained its popularity.

Also, Albert Einstein is quoted saying: "This (Number the Language of Science) is beyond th most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands"