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Title: The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer
ISBN: 0471393401
Author:
Georges Ifrah
Publicate Date: 2000-10-09
Publish: 2000-10-09
List Price: $22.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.73
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $7.00
Amazon Merchant Price: $15.61
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| Customer Review: |
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1: The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer
I believe for many amateurs interested in the history of numbers, this is the only book they ever need. Amazingly thorough! Numbers being the fiber of any civilization, the book touches on some number-related areas like writing systems, astronomy, etc, and is beyond just covering pure numbers. It explains very well the reasons and ramifications of different number systems, with good coverage of their operational aspects. Its views are very well researched and very balanced!!
It should be a collection book for ANY history buff.
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2: math history you can use
I am a teacher and I love this book. I use it to teach counting systems to young children. I like having access to all kinds of math of the past. How to write it, how it was used, the subtleties of each language. I personally love it for myself as well - I am a math teacher and this is the best I have found for getting lots of great info on the history of math. I like to know when things happened in the intellectual development of mathematics.
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3: Like Reading an Encyclopedia
This book is subtitled "from Prehistory to the invention of the computer", which is a little misleading. The text really ends about the stage of Europe's adoption of "Arabic numerals".
This reader thought there were three main trends within the book.
1st. A history of how every culture formed its counting system, from Polynesians islanders, to Tierra del Fuego, various African tribes to ancient and extinct cultures, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, knot tying, tally sticks to body counting. The author's blurb says the author Georges Ifrah spent 10 years in a worldwide quest recording different culture's counting systems. The author is a truly unique man, nothing escapes this author.
2nd The overall views are interesting, and the illustrations are suburb. The different systems explained from a historical perspective are though provoking. The author does a wonderful job explaining how each system works.
3rd This book is really at the encyclopedia level. The minutiae between the different counting systems of Polynesian body counting systems is of little concern, but this is how precise this book gets. The info is there if its needed.
4th There is no mention of mathematicians, Pythagoreans, ancient trigonometry or algebra in the book, just an expose' of numbering systems. Thw author sticks with numbering systems.
The reader will be in awe of this book's informational overload. I found the secret is to know what to read and what to skim and it makes a rewarding book to give one an appreciation of the numbering system we have today, and surprisingly other systems that have not been entirely retired such as tally sticks, and abacuses.
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4: A great book to browse through
I was intrigued enough by Mr. Peterson's review here to look at the review by Dauben that he mentions. My conclusion is that the Dauben review should be treated with a grain of salt. It's not particularly balanced. In some of the criticism of Ifrah from people with more degrees than he has, one gets just a whiff of jealousy that the reviewers didn't have the endurance to write the book themselves.If they had, I doubt they would have done any better of a job. Ifrah's book isn't perfect, but one can't expect such a book to be. This book is huge, folks. Ifrah is only one human being who tried to synthesize dozens of fields in none of which he could expect to become an expert. I think he did his best and I find his writing style companionable. Of course he makes errors, but he says a lot more things very well. We should be mindful of the book's limitations. But we also have to be grateful for what Ifrah managed to do.
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5: A deception?
This book is getting raves from intelligent readers who are not
experts in the history of numbers. But it sure isn't getting good reviews from experts. A group of scholars in France was disturbed by the uncritical popularity of the French edition,
and released a report calling the French edition "historically
unacceptable, a deception." [Bulletin de l'Association des
Professeurs de Mathematiques de l'Enseignement Publique 399 June 1995)] (I got this quote from Joseph Dauben's book review.)
More recently, in the January 2002 and February 2002 issues of
the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Joseph Dauben
of Lehman College at CUNY critiqued the English tranlations of this book and its companion, "The Universal History of Computing." Professor Dauben consulted a number of experts in specialties such as the history of Arabic mathematics, Hindu mathematics, Mesopotamian mathematics, Chinese mathematics, and Mayan mathematics. His review is skeptical. I'll quote various lines from Dauben's January review: "...he[Ifrah]either wrote to the wrong experts, was indifferent to their responses, or was not prepared to settle for their inconclusive results and the tentative nature of their research." "...Ifrah offers nothing but certainties." (when writing about
the Hindu-Arabic number system) "[James]Ritter simply declares all of this to be false, due to an erroneous conflation of sources. First of all, he takes Ifrah's list to be a contrived amalgamation of names coming from
all epochs." (James Ritter is an Assyriologist at Universite de Paris VIII, the quote is about Ifrah's conclusions about Sumerian numbers.) Read Professor Dauben's review. Afterwards, George Ifrah's fun-to-read, plausible book won't count for as much.
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