MATH 381: Mathematics with a historical perspective


Text:

Carl Boyer, A History of Mathematics, John Wiley, 2011

Assignments:

Assignment 1
Assignment 2
Assignment 3
Assignment 4


Slides of Lectures

1. Introduction and Ancient Egypt
2. Mesopotamia
3. Thales and Pythagoras
4. Three problems of antiquity
5. Plato and Aristotle
6. Euclid of Alexandria
7. Archimedes
8. Archimedes and the sphere
9. Appolonius and conic sections
10. Greek trigonometry: Eratosthenes and Heron
11. Diophantus and Pappus
12. Mathematics in Ancient China
13. Mathematics in Ancient India
14. Brahmagupta and Bhaskara
15. Al-Khwarizmi and Arabic Mathematics
16. Fibonacci and Mathematics in the Middle Ages
17. Mathematics of the Renaissance
18. Viete, Kepler and Galileo: 16th century mathematics
19. Pascal, Fermat and Descartes
20. From Madhava to Wallis: Prelude to calculus
21. Newton and Leibniz: The development of calculus
22. Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws       Documentary on Newton
23. The Bernoulli family and the development of analysis
24. Stirling and de Moivre: The development of probability theory
25. The Age of Euler
26. Lagrange, Laplace, Legendre and the French Revolution
27. Gauss, The Prince of Mathematicians
28. Cauchy, Fourier and Chebycheff
29. Galois, Abel and Jacobi: the development of group theory
30. Riemann and Dirichlet: the distribution of primes
31. 20th century mathematics: a short survey
32. 20th century mathematics: a short survey (video)