Dated now, in 2023, but a good read years ago. One of those books that influenced my worldview. ( )

7/6/22

Don't let the introduction of this book fool you! While the front-matter is enticing and exciting, the rest of the book fails to live up to these expectations. This book manages to make an exciting topic boring and hard to suffer through via a combination of flowery, say-nothing prose and a focus on the people rather than the math.

OK, I get it -- for the most part, readers do want people stories over math, but those are not the people who are going to be reading this book. Know your audience, Eric Temple Bell. I would not recommend this book in the slightest.

If you're looking for a book that presents the history of nerdy shit well, treat yourself to "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and skip over this drivel. ( )

Interesting book. Got me through many transit trips to and from work back in 2010 or so. Gives some history of the mathematician's lives and times along with their most cherished works. Includes people I never even heard of before. For instance, the book talks of Abel, Cauchy, Jacobi and Galois, but it also talks of Newton, Gauss, and Euler. It covers them in chronological order based on the birth date I think. I would have to check again to make sure.

Anyway, quite interesting for a novice mathematician or a person into the history of mathematics. I honestly don't know who else would be interested in this book.

On the second reading:

Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell is a fascinating account of both the lives and the achievements of the greatest mathematicians in history. Since this is based on historical mathematicians, they don’t attempt to talk about the people that invented the concept of number. The book is split into 29 chapters with an introduction being included in the count. Some of the chapters include more than one mathematician, but most of them are devoted to only one. For instance, the second chapter talks about three Greek mathematicians; Zeno, Eudoxus, and Archimedes. It includes some of the things they developed but most of the book is devoted to the biographical aspect of it. So Zeno is included because of his four paradoxes that argue that motion is impossible, while Archimedes is included because he practically invented the Calculus without inventing it. Eudoxus is the opposite of Zeno in that he developed a method to deal with infinitesimals.

This book seems to be Europe-centered in that it jumps from the Ancient Greeks to Rene Descartes. So you won’t find an account of the lives of the great Hindu and Arabic Mathematicians, which is somewhat surprising. Ah well, maybe at the time not a lot was known about them. However, I won’t make too many excuses for Professor Bell. All I can say is that the book is good but incomplete.

So it covers Descartes, and the rest of the book is chronological in its treatment. Each person covered has an Epitaph or Epithet summing up their work. Gauss is called the “Prince of Mathematicians”, while the chapter covering the Bernoulli family is called “Nature or Nurture?” Fermat is known as “The Prince of Amateurs” and so on. Here is a list of the mathematicians covered in the book:

Zeno, Eudoxus, Archimedes
Rene Descartes
Pierre de Fermat
Blaise Pascal
Isaac Newton
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The Bernoulli Family
Leonard Euler
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
Pierre-Simon de Laplace
Gaspard Monge and Joseph Fourier
Jean-Victor Poncelet
Johann Friedrich Carl Gauss
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
Nikolas Ivanovitch Lobachewsky
Niels Henrik Abel
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
William Rowan Hamilton
Evariste Galois
Arthur Cayley and James Joseph Sylvester
Karl Wilhelm Theodor Weierstrass and Sonja Kowalewski
George Boole
Charles Hermite
Leopold Kronecker
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann
Ernst Eduard Kummer and Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind
Henri Poincaré
Georg Cantor

As I said earlier, the book does cover some parts of the work they did but the main focus is the biographical point of view.

I read this book before 2012, but I do not recall the exact dates. I decided to pick it back up and read it again to refresh my memories of it. ( )

The main intent here is biographical rather than mathematical. But this isn't a very good account. He doesn't distinguish between facts and anecdotes and the author always lets his prejudices get in the way of narrative. I guess it just reflects the times in which it was written. The parts i liked the most of this book were the mathematical parts. ( )