Mathematics: An Illustrated History of Numbers

Mathematics has rarely advanced in straight lines. It has moved forward through puzzles - confounding problems that, once solved, changed how we understand the world. This history traces a hundred of the most significant of these moments, following the thinkers behind them from antiquity to the present day. Among them is Pythagoras, whose devotion to numbers may have led to murder; Fibonacci, whose work for bookkeepers reshaped the way we add; and Descartes, who found in the flight of a fly a way to turn numbers into shapes and back again. Together, their stories move well past schoolday sums toward something closer to the real power of mathematics.