Men of Mathematics

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Men of Mathematics is a well-known book on the history of mathematics written by the mathematician E.T. Bell. After a brief chapter on three ancient mathematicians, the remainder of the book is devoted to describing the lives of about thirty famous mathematicians who worked in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The major weight is on the mainstream mathematics following on from the work of Gauss.

In order to keep the interest of readers, the book typically focuses on unusual or dramatic aspects of its subjects' lives. While Men of Mathematics has inspired many young people, including a young John Forbes Nash Jr., to become mathematicians, it is not known for the accuracy of its historical scholarship.

In particular, the book's most famous chapter, on Galois, is noted for its fanciful and often wholly inaccurate account of the events surrounding Galois's death in a duel at the age of twenty ([1] describes Bell's 'romantic inventions'). The book presents also a somewhat idealised picture of mathematicians, their personalities, research and controversies. ([2] describes it as 'pretty free with the truth'.)

[edit] Contents

Zeno, Eudoxus, Archimedes Descartes Fermat Pascal Newton Leibniz The Bernoullis Euler Lagrange Laplace Monge, Fourier Poncelet Gauss Cauchy

Lobatchewsky Abel Jacobi Hamilton Galois Sylvester, Cayley Weierstrass, Sonja Kowalewski [sic] Boole Hermite Kronecker Riemann Kummer, Dedekind Poincaré Cantor

[edit] References

• Bell, E. T. Men of Mathematics. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1937 (o.p.)
• Bell, E. T. Men of Mathematics. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1986 (paperback; ISBN 0-671-62818-6)
• Bell, E. T. Men of Mathematics. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1986 (library binding; ISBN 0-8335-0022-8)