MATH 5400 in the Summer of 2004

Book list for GS/MATS 5400, History of Mathematics, Summer 2004

Amir D. Aczel, Fermat's Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of An Ancient Mathematical Problem. New York: Dell, 1996. ISBN 0-385-31946-0.

Amir D. Aczel, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity. New York: Washington Square Press, 2000. ISBN 0-7434-2299-6.

William Dunham, Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1990. ISBN 0-471-50030-5.

Reinhard Laubenbacher and David Pengelley, Mathematical Expeditions: Chronicles by the Explorers. New York: Springer, 1999. ISBN 0-387-98433-X

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-521-38884-8.

Course Director:

Byron Wall

Email: bwall@yorku.ca

Course will meet basically twice a week on Monday or Tuesday and Thursdays, 6 to 9 p.m., from May to the end of June. Except that it will not meet at all between May 5 and 19, and then it will make up the missed classes by meeting three times a week in late June and/or July.

Hence, the first two meetings of the class will be on Monday May 3 and Tuesday May 4. At the May 4 meeting, I will give a reading assignment to be completed over the next two weeks. The next class will be on May 20, at which time we will discuss the reading of the previous two weeks.

Thus three normal class meetings will be missed in May. These will be made up later in the course, most likely in July. Hence the course will meet twice a week (either Monday and Thursday or Tuesday and Thursday) for most of the term and then Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday for three weeks in July. At the beginning of the course, we can fix the particular days of class for the whole term.