The Great Invention of Algebra provides an insight into the work of Thomas Harriot, an innovative thinker and practitioner in several branches of the mathematical sciences, including navigation, astronomy, optics, geometry and algebra. This book focuses on one hundred and forty of these manuscript pages and concentrates on Harriot's work on the structure and solution of equations.

Writing in 1939, the historian of mathematics Herbert Turnbull described John Pell as 'a mysterious figure' and commented: 'he may well prove to be an unsuspected genius, for his manuscripts appear to survive, unexamined, in the British Museum.' Turnbull's expectations were pitched a little too high: although Pell was a man of unusual intellectual abilities, and one of the leading mathematicians of his day, his work does not merit any use of the term 'genius'. The term 'mysterious', on the other hand, was well deserved; and no less mysterious is the fact that the great majority of Pell's...

Aimed at students and researchers in Mathematics, History of Mathematics and Science, this book examines the development of mathematics from the late 16th Century to the end of the 20th Century. Mathematics has an amazingly long and rich history, it has been practised in every society and culture, with written records reaching back in some cases as far as four thousand years. This book will focus on just a small part of the story, in a sense the most recent chapter of it: the mathematics of western Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Each chapter will focus on a particular...