Description
A new history of mathematics focusing on the marginalized voices who propelled the discipline, spanning six continents and thousands of years of untold stories.
A book to make you love math. —Financial Times
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—warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, renowned math historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell make the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than the narrative we think we know.
Our story takes us from Hypatia, the first great female mathematician, whose ideas revolutionized geometry and who was killed for them—to Karen Uhlenbeck, the first woman to win the Abel Prize, “math’s
