The authors have been beguiled and entranced by mathematics all of their lives, and both believe it is the highest expression of pure thought and an essential component-one might say the quintessence-of nature. How else can one ex plain the remarkable effectiveness of mathematics in describing and predicting the physical world? The projection of the mathematical method onto the subspace of human endeav 1 ors has long been a source of societal progress and commercial technology. The invention of the electronic digital computer (not the mechanical digital computer of Babbage) has made the role...

Differential and complex geometry are two central areas of mathematics with a long and intertwined history. This book, the first to provide a unified historical perspective of both subjects, explores their origins and developments from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
Providing a detailed examination of the seminal contributions to differential and complex geometry up to the twentieth-century embedding theorems, this monograph includes valuable excerpts from the original documents, including works of Descartes, Fermat, Newton, Euler, Huygens, Gauss, Riemann, Abel, and Nash....