» e: The Story of a Number

e: The Story of a Number Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: e++ taught well
Comment: I find the history of mathematics fascinating and essential to the understanding of world history. And "e: The Story of a Number", does a great job of presenting the history of "e" in a very enjoyable manner.

Unfortunately however, math is mostly taught, for expediency, as a set of rules without historical context, which I believe in the long run tends to retard the learning process and the depth of understanding necessary as a foundation for further study.

"e: The Story of a Number", should be considered essential reading for students at the junior high school level as a way to show connectivity of the subjects of history, science, mathematics, music and the arts. The book brings these subjects together in a compact way that virtually transports one back in time to observe the masters at work; their personalities and relationships with their peers. I was fascinated from chapter 1 as I read about John Napier lifetime work of computing logarithmic tables; imagining the strength of the underlying motivation for his work in that time, I might have been a better student myself.

Finally, the mathematics behind the discoveries of the numbers in Euler's famous formula, e^ipie + 1 = 0 are clearly brought into focus in a manner that is easy for the layman to follow. Thank you Mr. Eli Maor!

I strongly recommend this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The story of e is is a history of mathematics
Comment: Over the centuries, the irrational number pi has received an enormous amount of interest, largely because it is the easiest transcendental number to understand. While they often cannot understand the reasons why pi is irrational, even schoolchildren can use it with ease. The definition is easy and a circle is one of the first shapes children learn.
That is not the case with the base of the natural logarithms or e. Knowledge of a good deal of higher-level mathematics is a precondition to understanding the definition of e and it did not appear in mathematics until much later than pi. Defined as the limit of an infinite sequence, e is one of the most useful numbers in engineering.
This book is a somewhat wayward look at the historical and intellectual background of the development of the number e. Given that calculus is required to appreciate the value of the number and that it is the base of the natural logarithms, the historical figures in the story of e are the giants of the development of calculus and logarithms. Therefore, a large portion of the book deals with the development of these two very significant areas of mathematics.
The best and most useful mathematical ideas are often those with an extensive history of development and e certainly falls into this category. This book could serve as a popular history of the number e as well as a background primer for courses in the history of mathematics. For the history of e is largely a history of mathematics.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fabulous book, but there is an important error
Comment: This is a wonderful book, but there is an error in a crucial explanation on page 66. This has to do with the calculation of the area under the curve y=1/x. The error is that the height of the curve at position a is not (1/a) as stated in the book, but is (1/ar). Therefore, the common areas are not 1-r, but ((1-r)/r). Same observation holds, though, namely that the areas defined by geometrically decreasing widths have equal areas, and hence a log must be involved.

An alternative correction is to leave the algebra, but change the diagram so that the rectangles are under the curve, in which case everything works out as written.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is trying to grasp the "meaning" of e.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very entertaining
Comment: Anyone who enjoys somewhat light (but meaningful) mathematical reading would likely appreciate this wonderfully woven tale of e. The focus is on developing an intuitive appreciation for e as it relates to various aspects of mathematics. A modest knowledge of differential and integral calculus would help, though it is not essential. It is very engaging. No story about e would be complete without Euler's identity -- which relates the five most important mathematical constants: e, pi, i, 0, and 1 -- but for good measure Maor has tossed in the golden ratio as well when describing the logarithmic spiral -- as if nature itself has validated our understanding of e with a compelling artistic design that presents itself in verious natural forms. This book is one of my favorites.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Amazing minds!
Comment: This was a good book for someone who likes math and is willing to work a little. You should have had (and enjoyed at some point) a little algebra, geometry, and calculus. Even if your math is rusty like mine, you will be able to follow this book well enough. I was surprised how much of it came back to me. (I wouldn't want to be tested on it though!)

The most fascinating thing to me was the brainpower that thought this stuff up! How they could have pumped so much out of the natural logarithm (e) was simply amazing to me, things such as the elegant infinite series of fractions and continued fractions, continued exponentials, sometimes with factorials. Perhaps the most amazing thing was the totally unintuitive formula e raised to the power of the product of i and pi = -1; imagine e, i, and pi contained in one short,neat, little formula! This book is also about the history of math, how calculus was invented, and how imaginary numbers found their place in math. Fortunately for me, Eli Maor goes slow enough and skips enough of the details and the proofs to make this book readable. He also gives neat short biographies of the main characters in the history of mathematics to break the hard math up. The one that was most fascinating to me was an 18th century mathametician named Leonhard Euler (who came up with e raised to the product of pi and i = 1), whom Eli Maor called "unquestionably the Mozart of math". He is relatively unknown simply because he was bracketed in time between Newton and Galileo. I do, however, have to confess I got a bit lost near the end of the book with his dissertation on complex variables (imaginary and real). The math there was a bit too dense for me (or maybe I was too dense).

I can't figure out how e raised to the power of the product of pi and i can come out to a real number (-1) since it is about a real number raised to an imaginary power. How is that even possible? How in the world did Euler come up with the formula! Maor says he'll leave it to the reader to decide if this remarkable formula is a part of "the Creator's grand scheme".

It was also a relief to read a math book without having to be graded. That was a first for me.

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