Math History

While Brilliant's Math History course is not intended to be an academic or authoritative reference, we consulted such references extensively during the course's construction. We've listed a partial bibliography here for those who want to dive into these stories on their own, or who might wonder where the information came from.

Please remember that history is an attempt to reconstruct stories that are often incomplete, conflicting, or altogether missing. Not all of these works are authoritative, but they all proved helpful in different ways in making this course.

Primary sources are marked in bold. Enjoy!

• A History of Mathematics, Boyer
• Number Theory and Its History, Ore
• Journey through Genius, Dunham
• The Universal History of Numbers, Ifrah
• Power in Numbers, Williams

• Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs, Gillings
• Africa Counts, Zaslavsky
• African Mathematics, Bangura
• "The Area and the Side I Added: Some Old Babylonian Geometry", Melville
• "Old Babylonian 'Quadratic' Problems", Melville

• The Elements, Euclid, (Trans. Heath)
• Introduction to Arithmetic, Nichomachus, (Trans. D'Ogde)
• A History of Greek Mathematics, Heath
• The Music of the Primes, du Sautoy

• Algebra with Arithmetic and Mensuration from the Sanscrit, Bhramegupta and Bhascara, (Trans. Colebrooke)
• The Nothing that Is, Kaplan
• Zero, Seife
• Studies in the History of Indian Mathematics, Seshadri
• "Equation Solving in Indian Mathematics", Homsi

• The Algebra of Mohammed Ben Musa, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, (Trans. Rosen)
• "From Al-Khwarizmi to Algorithm", Mehri
• Galois Theory, Escofier

• "A Geometric Solution of a Cubic by Omar Khayyam…", Kent and Muraki
• Ars Magna, Cardano, (Trans. Witmer)
• An Imaginary Tale, Nahin

• The Universal History of Computing, Ifrah
• "What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do?", Target
• Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, Toole
• Mathematical Treasure: Ada Lovelace's Notes on the Analytic Engine, Swetz
• The Bernoulli number page, Kellner