MATH 4030 - History of Mathematics

(HB) (MQR-AS, SMR-AS)

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: two mathematics courses above 3000, or permission of instructor. Students will be expected to be comfortable with proofs. Offered alternate years.

Staff.

Development of mathematics from Babylon and Egypt and the Golden Age of Greece through its nineteenth century renaissance in the Paris of Cauchy and Lagrange and the Berlin of Weierstrass and Riemann. Covers basic algorithms underlying algebra, analysis, number theory, and geometry in historical order. Theorems and exercises cover the impossibility of duplicating cubes and trisecting angles, which regular polygons can be constructed by ruler and compass, the impossibility of solving the general fifth degree algebraic equation by radicals, the transcendence of pi. Students give presentations from original sources over 5000 years of mathematics.