The Art of More How Mathematics Created Civilization

An illuminating, millennia-spanning history of the impact mathematics has had on the world, and the fascinating people who have mastered its inherent power, from Babylonian tax officials to the Apollo astronauts to the eccentric professor who invented the infrastructure of the online world

Counting is not innate to our nature, and without education humans can rarely count past three—beyond that, it’s just “more.” But once harnessed by our ancestors, the power of numbers allowed humanity to flourish in ways that continue to lead to discoveries and enrich our lives today.  
 
Ancient tax collectors used basic numeracy to fuel the growth of early civilization, navigators used clever geometrical tricks to engage in trade and connect people across vast distances, astronomers used logarithms to unlock the secrets of the heavens, and their descendants put them to use to land us on the moon. In every case, mathematics has proved to be a greatly underappreciated engine of human progress.  
 
In this captivating, sweeping history, Michael Brooks acts as our guide through the ages. He makes the case that mathematics was one of the foundational innovations that catapulted humanity from a nomadic existence to civilization, and that it has since then been instrumental in every great leap of humankind. Here are ancient Egyptian priests, Babylonian bureaucrats, medieval architects, dueling Swiss brothers, and renaissance painters. Their stories clearly demonstrate that the invention of mathematics was every bit as important to the human species as was the discovery of fire. From first page to last, The Art of More brings mathematics back into the heart of what it means to be human.

MICHAEL BROOKS is a science writer with a PhD in quantum physics. He the author of several books, including 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time and The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook (a 2017 Daily Telegraph Book of the Year). He lives in the United Kingdom.
 

Author’s Note vii
Introduction
    Why our skill with numbers is the greatest human achievement of all 1
 
Chapter 1: Arithmetic
    How we founded civilization 7
 
Chapter 2: Geometry
    How we conquered and created 37
 
Chapter 3: Algebra
    How we got organized 80
 
Chapter 4: Calculus
    How we engineered everything 118
 
Chapter 5: Logarithms
    How we launched science 152
 
Chapter 6: Imaginary Numbers
    How we fired up the electric age 179
 
Chapter 7: Statistics
    How we made everything better 211
 
Chapter 8: Information Theory
    How we created the modern era 249
 
Conclusion:
     Maths is a many-splendored thing 285
 
Acknowledgements 293
Notes 295
Index 313