DC Public Library System

The queen of the sciences, a history of mathematics, the Teaching Company

eng

Course workbook includes professor biography, acknowledgments, statement of course scope, lecture outline with suggested readings and questions to consider, timeline, glossary, biographical notes, and bibliography

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The queen of the sciences

320475909

the Teaching Company

720

The great courses, Science & mathematics

a history of mathematics

In the 17th century, scientist and mathematician Galileo Galilei noted that the book of nature "cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics ... without which it is not humanly possible to understand a single word of it." The same feeling prompted German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to call mathematics the "queen of the sciences" because of this success in uncovering the nature of physical reality. For at least 4,000 years of recorded history, humans have engaged in the study of mathematics, and this examination begins in ancient Mesopotamia and leads directly to the Human Genome Project, which uses sophisticated mathematical techniques to decipher the 3 billion letters of the human genetic code. Today quantum physics, string theory, chaos theory, information technology, and other mathematics-intensive disciplines that have transformed the way we understand and deal with the world

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History of mathematics