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From Here to Infinity (book)

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From Here to Infinity
AuthorIan Stewart
LanguageEnglish
GenrePopular science
PublisherOxford Paperbacks
Publication date
1996
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint
Pages310 pp.
ISBN0-19-283202-6
OCLC32699983

From Here to Infinity: A Guide to Today's Mathematics, a 1996 book by mathematician and science popularizer Ian Stewart, is a guide to modern mathematics for the general reader. It aims to answer questions such as "What is mathematics?", "What is it for " and "What are mathematicians doing nowadays?". Author Simon Singh describes it as "An interesting and accessible account of current mathematical topics".[1]

Summary

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After an introductory chapter The Nature of Mathematics, Stewart devotes each of the following 18 chapters to an exposition of a particular problem that has given rise to new mathematics or an area of research in modern mathematics.

Editions

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Important advances in mathematics necessitated revisions of the book. For example, when the 1st edition came out, Fermat's Last Theorem was still an open problem. By the 3rd edition, it has been solved by Andrew Wiles. Other revised topics include Tarski's circle-squaring problem, Carmichael numbers, and the Kepler Problem.

  • 1st edition (1987): published under the title The Problems of Mathematics
  • 2nd edition (1992)
  • retitled/revised edition (1996)

References

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  1. ^ My Favourite Mathematics Books Archived 2008-09-17 at the Wayback Machine, Simon Singh