Mathematics has a reputation of being dull and difficult. Here is an antidote. This lively exploration of arithmetic considers its basic processes and manipulations, demonstrating their value and power and justifying an enduring interest in the subject. With humour and insight, the author shows how basic mathematics relates to everyday life as true now as when this book was originally published in 1940. The introductory treatment of millions, billions and even trillions could be profitably read by aspiring bankers, economists or politicians. H. G. Wells is gently teased for his mistake in...

The famous and prolific nineteenth-century mathematician, engineer and inventor Charles Babbage (1791 1871) was an early pioneer of computing. He planned several calculating machines, but none was built in his lifetime. On his death his youngest son, Henry P. Babbage, was charged with the task of completing an unfinished volume of papers on the machines, which was finally published in 1889 and is reissued here. The papers, by a variety of authors, were collected from journals including The Philosophical Magazine, The Edinburgh Review and Scientific Memoirs. They relate to the construction and...

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839 1903) was the greatest American mathematician and physicist of the nineteenth century. He played a key role in the development of vector analysis (his book on this topic is also reissued in this series), but his deepest work was in the development of thermodynamics and statistical physics. This book, Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, first published in 1902, gives his mature vision of these subjects. Mathematicians, physicists and engineers familiar with such things as Gibbs entropy, Gibbs inequality and the Gibbs distribution will find them here...

John Leigh Smeathman Hatton (1865 1933) was a British mathematician and educator. He worked for 40 years at a pioneering educational project in East London that began as the People's Palace and eventually became Queen Mary College in the University of London. Hatton served as its Principal from 1908 to 1933. This book, published in 1920, explores the relationship between imaginary and real non-Euclidean geometry through graphical representations of imaginaries under a variety of conventions. This relationship is of importance as points with complex determining elements are present in both...

The two great works of the celebrated French mathematician Henri Lebesgue (1875 1941), Lecons sur l'integration et la recherche des fonctions primitives professees au College de France (1904) and Lecons sur les series trigonometriques professees au College de France (1906) arose from lecture courses he gave at the College de France while holding a teaching post at the University of Rennes. In 1901 Lebesgue formulated measure theory; and in 1902 his new definition of the definite integral, which generalised the Riemann integral, revolutionised integral calculus and greatly expanded the scope...

George Birtwistle (1877 1929) published The New Quantum Mechanics in 1928. His stated aim was to give a detailed account of work which had brought the relatively new subject of quantum mechanics to the fore in the previous few years. The earlier chapters give a restatement of Alfred Lande's theory of multiplets which reconciles it with the new mechanics which follow. Later chapters present the matrix theory of Heisenberg, the q-number theory of Dirac and the wave mechanics of Schroedinger, and synthesise new theories, statistics and controversies in the work of de Broglie, Bose, Einstein,...

The two great works of the celebrated French mathematician Henri Lebesgue (1875 1941), Lecons sur l'integration et la recherche des fonctions primitives professees au College de France (1904) and Lecons sur les series trigonometriques professees au College de France (1906) arose from lecture courses he gave at the College de France while holding a teaching post at the University of Rennes. In 1901 Lebesgue formulated measure theory; and in 1902 his new definition of the definite integral, which generalised the Riemann integral, revolutionised integral calculus and greatly expanded the scope...

Henry Frederick Baker (1866 1956) was a renowned British mathematician specialising in algebraic geometry. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1898 and appointed the Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry in the University of Cambridge in 1914. First published between 1922 and 1925, the six-volume Principles of Geometry was a synthesis of Baker's lecture series on geometry and was the first British work on geometry to use axiomatic methods without the use of co-ordinates. The first four volumes describe the projective geometry of space of between two and five dimensions,...

Henry Frederick Baker (1866 1956) was a renowned British mathematician specialising in algebraic geometry. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1898 and appointed the Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry in the University of Cambridge in 1914. First published between 1922 and 1925, the six-volume Principles of Geometry was a synthesis of Baker's lecture series on geometry and was the first British work on geometry to use axiomatic methods without the use of co-ordinates. The first four volumes describe the projective geometry of space of between two and five dimensions,...

Henry Frederick Baker (1866 1956) was a renowned British mathematician specialising in algebraic geometry. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1898 and appointed the Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry in the University of Cambridge in 1914. First published between 1922 and 1925, the six-volume Principles of Geometry was a synthesis of Baker's lecture series on geometry and was the first British work on geometry to use axiomatic methods without the use of co-ordinates. The first four volumes describe the projective geometry of space of between two and five dimensions,...