A History of Algebra: From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether 1st Edition by B. L. Van Der Waerden (PDF)

Description

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I give it four stars because I agree with Eric Drexler on one thing! No book can possibly be perfect. One curious imperfection from Van Der Waerden’s ‘History of Algebra’ is how abruptly it endsIf that doesn’t express how abruptly it ends, I don’t know how else to express it! About the only problem I had with the book is how little he says about algebraic invariance theory. I would have liked him to say how algebraic invariance theory related to Emmy Noether’s work. The book was only 270 pages; surely, he could have fit some more mathematics in this great book! He does mention quickly that there is something called invariance theory, but he just references off.Seems that he has chosen to stop where Homology takes over algebraic progress. I don’t know how much to criticize there.I don’t think he covers Emil Artin’s Galois theory either! I suppose one could just go to Emil Artin’s account it!Van Der Waerden shows that Al Kowarizmi did not think about his algebraic innovations from studying the geometric algebra of Euclid’s Elements. It was purely from Eastern inspiration. He shows that Vieta solves long standing problems of Greek geometry amongst so much else. If you weren’t convinced that Vieta was a major mathematician, you should be after Van Der Waerden’s account! Van Der Waerden covers the history leading up to Abel and Galois’s work on the general closed form fifth degree. He shows nobody works in a vacuum!Van Der Waerden continues to be able to dig out the historic roots of ideas with quaternions and shows the generalizations of those all the way into the twentieth century.Van Der Waerden steers as clear of ring theory and number theory as he can(as much as he doesn’t get into invariance theory). This 1) shows just how much astonishing mathematics there is; yet, even he has to point out a few number theory results and reference Dickson’s three volume history of number theory(which doesn’t even cover Hilbert’s relative fields and class field theory), and yet 2) he cannot. I feel he should have remarked that mathematics is a unified whole no matter how hard it can be to concieve of. For this reason E.T. Bell’s books “Men of Mathematics” and “Development of Mathematics”(both cover things not covered in the other! Both are equally good!) are still valuable imo. There’s also John Stillwell’s works; they’re good; but, I find reading Van Der Waerden and Thomas Heath’s books on Greek mathematics that John Stillwell’s technical history books are “Naive technical history.” Mathematicians have a bad habit of putting up attitudes; i find that even John Stillwell is not immune!Despite every problem I can find, it’s hard to argue with how much mathematics Van Der Waerden stuffs in this book. My biggest head scratcher his abrupt ending! I wonder if he meant to include more twentieth century matheamtics.———————————————————————————————————P.S.I’ve changed the title to express what is perhaps Van Der Waerden’s best strength; to present mathematics as the originators thought things out – at least as much as possible.

⭐

Keywords

Free Download A History of Algebra: From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether 1st Edition in PDF format
A History of Algebra: From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether 1st Edition PDF Free Download
Download A History of Algebra: From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether 1st Edition 1985 PDF Free
A History of Algebra: From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether 1st Edition 1985 PDF Free Download
Download A History of Algebra: From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether 1st Edition PDF
Free Download Ebook A History of Algebra: From Al-Khwarizmi to Emmy Noether 1st Edition