Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra - Softcover

"* 'Unknown Quantity buzzes with rivalries, frustrations and breakthroughs... A first-rate account that even algebraphobes will struggle to fault.' New Scientist * 'Derbyshire is a virtuoso at simplifying mathematics... This is more than an engaging history; it records an entire, perhaps endangered, way of thinking.' Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph * 'Everything a popular mathematics book should be: gentle, chatty, anecdotal and full of mind-aching equations... Worth reading twice.' Alexander Masters, Literary Review * 'Derbyshire offers a very real and very entertaining survey of the development of algebra.' Publishers Weekly (US)"

'Here is the story of algebra.' With this deceptively simple introduction, Unknown Quantity opens, thirty-eight centuries ago, at the time of Abraham and Isaac. In stylish and accessible prose, Derbyshire shows how the invention of algebra was more than the beginning of a specific discipline of mathematics; it was also the birth of a new way of thinking that altered, forever, the ways in which we see and understand our world.