內容簡介
內容簡介 史都華教授再次出擊！你是否曾在學校數學課課堂上想著，學這些數學究竟有什麼用？或者被一堆看不懂的數字、公式追著跑呢？數學總是讓人又愛又恨，大家都了解它既是科技發展的關鍵，卻現實中又是讓眾多人頭昏腦脹的一門科學。在這本書中，史都華教授以二十五位知名數學家的故事，例如阿基米德、本華·曼德博、勒芙蕾絲伯爵夫人等大人物，來介紹數學的歷史、數學重大發現的契機，和數學在現代生活中的角色。如果你還在為眼前的數學公式煩惱，不如先來看看前人們創造數學的故事吧！英國華威大學的數學榮譽教授伊恩‧史都華，長年致力於推廣數學，希望可以消除大眾對數學的恐懼，已出版數本和數學相關的書籍，如《給青年數學家的信》、《學數學，弄懂這39個數字就對了》和《改變世界的17個方程式》等書。Which mathematician elaborated a crucial concept the night before he died in a duel? Who funded his maths and medical career through gambling and chess? Who learned maths from her wallpaper?Ian Stewart presents the extraordinary lives and amazing discoveries of twenty-five of history's greatest mathematicians from Archimedes and Liu Hui to Benoit Mandelbrot and William Thurston. His subjects are the inspiring individuals from all over the world who have made crucial contributions to mathematics. They include the rediscovered geniuses Srinivasa Ramanujan and Emmy Noether, alongside the towering figures of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (inventor of the algorithm), Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Bernhard Reimann (precursor to Einstein), Henri Poincaré, Ada Lovelace (arguably the first computer programmer), Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.Ian Stewart's vivid accounts are fascinating in themselves and, taken together, cohere into a riveting history of key steps in the development of mathematics.
