Numbers

A book about numbers sounds rather dull. This one is not. Instead it is a lively story about one thread of mathematics-the concept of "number"- told by eight authors and organized into a historical narrative that leads the reader from ancient Egypt to the late twentieth century. It is a story that begins with some of the simplest ideas of mathematics and ends with some of the most complex. It is a story that mathematicians, both amateur and professional, ought to know. Why write about numbers? Mathematicians have always found it diffi- cult to develop broad perspective about their subject. While we each view our specialty as having roots in the past, and sometimes having connec- tions to other specialties in the present, we seldom see the panorama of mathematical development over thousands of years. Numbers attempts to give that broad perspective, from hieroglyphs to K-theory, from Dedekind cuts to nonstandard analysis.