The History of Mathematics: A Brief Course

xviii PREFACE

Acknowledgements. I am grateful to the editors at Wiley, Steve Quigley and

especially Susanne Steitz, for keeping in touch throughout the long period of prepa-

ration for this book. I would also like to thank the copy editor, Barbara Zeiders,

who made so many improvements to the text that I could not begin to list them

all. I also ask Barbara to forgive my obstinacy on certain issues involving commas,

my stubborn conviction that independently of is correct usage, and my constitu-

tional inability to make all possessives end in 's. I cannot bring myself to write

Archimedes's or Descartes's; and if we are going to allow some exceptions for words

ending in a sibilant, as we must, I prefer—in defiance of the Chicago Manual of

Style—to use an unadorned apostrophe for the possessive of all words ending in s,

z, or x.

The diagram of Florence Nightingale's statistics on the Crimean War (Plate

5) is in the public domain; I wish to thank Cabinet magazine for providing the

electronic file for this plate.

Many of the literature references in the chapters that follow were given to me by

the wonderful group of mathematicians and historians on the Historia Mathematica

e-mail list. It seemed that, no matter how obscure the topic on which I needed

information, there was someone on the list who knew something about it. To Julio

Gonzalez Cabillon, who maintains the list as a service to the community, I am

deeply grateful.

January 2005

Roger Cooke