Sherlock Holmes in Babylon

This book is a collection of 44 articles on the history of mathematics, published in MAA journals over the past 100 years. Covering a span of almost 4000 years, from the ancient Babylonians to the eighteenth century, it chronicles the enormous changes in mathematical thinking over this time, as viewed by distinguished historians of mathematics from the past (Florian Cajori, Max Dehn, David Eugene Smith, Julian Lowell Coolidge and Carl Boyer) and the present.

Each of the four sections of the book (Ancient Mathematics, Medieval and Renaissance Mathematics, The Seventeenth Century, The Eighteenth Century) is preceded by a Foreword, in which the articles are put into historical context, and followed by an Afterword, in which they are reviewed in the light of current historical scholarship. In more than one case, two articles on the same topic are included, to show how knowledge and vies about the topic changed over the years.

This book will be enjoyed by anyone interested in mathematics and its history – and in particular by mathematics teachers at secondary, college, and university level.