It All Adds Up: The Story of People and Mathematics, William Collins, 2019 (272 p.

)
Le grand roman des maths: de la préhistoire à nos jours, Flammarion, 2016, (304 p.)
by Mickaël Launay

Mickaël Launay
Because of the success of the French original, the book has been
translated and is now also available in English. Launay writes
both a survey of the history of mathematics as is obvious from
the subtitles, but he does that using the usual topics that one
can find in many books on popular mathematics.
He starts somewhat surprisingly with the biface or hand
axe which he considers a geometric object and with the pottery decorations in the style of one of the
seven friezes. Somewhat more conventional is he start of counting, first using stones (calculi) or tal-
lying like on the Ishango bones. The history is told by topic and may stretch over several centuries.
Of course prehistoric people did not have a clue about seven friezes, and the history of counting also
includes the invention of digits and different number systems, an insight that came only much later.
For the coherence of the text, these facts are obviously brought together in one chapter. Early geometry
is introduced in Egypt and Greece, and soon we seen theorems appearing about solids and many about
plain geometry, in particular about triangles and circles. Geometry was the first mathematical theory that
the Greek conceived as an axiomatic system and an approach with definitions, theorems, and proofs. The
parallel postulate gave rise to a lot of speculation during many centuries.
The Greek were using a principle of commensurability: there is some smallest unit so
that all measures can
√ be expressed as integer multiples of that unit. They however were well
aware that π and 2 resisted this principle. So that brings the story back to numbers, and
more precisely the history of zero, first as a place holder in the representation of numbers,
but more importantly as a number on its own. Zero as a number is on the boundary between
the positive and the negative numbers. It also took a while before the negative numbers were
accepted as numbers.
biface
With the Arabs we learn more about tilings like in the Alhambra, but also about triangles
and trigonometry used in measuring areas and distances, but also in computer graphics. The Arabs also
brought us algebra to solve equations. After a short section about sequences, introduced starting from he
Fibonacci sequence, the story returns to the solution of equations of second or third degree (here comes
the classic story of Tartaglia) which entailed the introduction of imaginary numbers, first as an anomaly
that miraculously gave the correct result, but later as part of complex numbers.
When books where being printed, some symbols were introduced to denote equations and also geometry
could be handled with equations and algebra after Descartes introduced a coordinate system. And then
people started modelling physical phenomena. Of course astronomy was studied since antiquity, but also
crystallography became fashionable. It required the introduction of infinitesimals by Newton and Leibniz
to introduce differential equations. This difficult concept of something infinitesimally small and yet not
zero, caused a lot of controversy, but it was eventually also the reason to reconsider the set of numbers
that is on a continuous interval and the different orders of infinity.
Next comes the introduction of probability and the introduction of machines: the abacus, the Pascaline,
and all kinds of mechanical calculators, up to the Babbage machine. Subsequently programmable computers
and proofs by machines (the four colour problem) are discussed and eventually the computer winning in
chess and go from a human champion player.
In the last chapter, the fundamentals of the last century for current and future mathematics are ex-
plained: Hilbert’s problems, the Fields medal, the Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell and
the incompleteness theorems of Gödel, fractals introduced by Mandelbrot.
This is a popular science book, and thus stays for most subjects on the surface so that anybody can
understand. In fact Launay writes in his preface that he started writing the book out of frustration because
many people take some pride is admitting they are not good in math, while when Launay has some pop-up
stand on a market place doing card tricks, origami, games, riddles, and other things based on mathematics,
people do not consider that as mathematics. Like one can love music without being a musician, it is
equally possible to be interested in or to even love mathematics without being a mathematician. Like
artists, mathematicians explore and create mathematics out of curiosity, and that can be admired or
appreciated without being a buff at all the technicalities of mathematics.
Thus Launay is an entertaining story teller, taking the reader along on his visits to museums, and he
explains the mathematics that needs some explanation, but always as one would explain it to a (young)
neophyte. The topics that are traditional stumble stones in math education are particularly handled with
care, like the Zeno paradox of the Achilles and the tortoise, or why − × − = +. Because of a limited
number of pages that is digestible, there is also a choice to make, and only few topics are explained in more
details. For example his discussion of probability can be explained because he has a PhD in probability
(2009) form the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In many cases there exist complete books devoted to each of
the items that are only explored skin-deep here. He refers to several examples, but also to museums, and
websites. Also the reference list of papers used get a two-letter key referring to the historical time period
and the mathematical subject that is discussed.
I liked his account of how the town currently known as Baghdad was founded
that quickly became the scientific and cultural center of the known world with
the library of the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), reminding of the legendary
library of Alexandria. The example where a non-commutative binary operation
is defined for a set of symbols via a table, and then some algebra is done with
these symbols can also work very inspiring for the layperson. His exposition
of how to operate the arithmometer constructed by Willgodt Theophil Odhner
Odhner’s arithmometer (1877) is rarely found.
Joseph Mazur’s Enlightening Symbols (2014) and F. Cajori’s A history of
mathematical notation (first edition 1922) are devoted to the origins of many symbols that, besides numbers,
we are used to in our modern mathematical notation like π, e, i, 0, +, −, =, exponents and square roots.
Johannes Widmann (1460) was the first to
use + and − for the binary operations,
Tartaglia (1550) the first using parenthesis
( ), and Robert Recorde (1557) introduced
=, and Thomas Harriot (1631) used the <
and > with their current meaning. William
Oughtred (1631) had the × for multiplica-
tion, : for division and was the first to use π
for 3.1415... but Euler popularized it later.
The obelus ÷ for division is coined by Jo-
Principia Mathematica, page 379
hann Rahn (1659) and combines the Arab
From this theorem it follows that 1 + 1 = 2
horizontal line and the : of Oughtred and
√ √
Christoff Rudolff (1525) used for the square root and Descartes added the roof: . All that happened
in the 15th and 16th to early 17th century. Other proposals have been made, that did not become standard,
and it sometimes took many years before a notation got accepted by the majority. Symbols for + and −
were known earlier by the Arabs. Also variants of the radix sign existed earlier. So some of the origins are
fuzzy and the above mentioned origins do not always the same as what is mentioned by Mazur or Cajori.
Sometimes these symbols had subtly different meanings and they still do, The = can stand for an equality
or define an equation in which case it could be unidirectional or bidirectional. In the latter case a + x = b
is not the same as x = b − a. In definitions one sometimes uses := to indicate that the left is defined
by the right. Also in programming languages it can have a unidirectional meaning sometimes denoted as
x ← x + y meaning that the place containing the value of x is replaced by the value of the sum. It is
remarkable how much mathematicians could achieve in the period what mathematics was very verbose and
they had to figure out the solution without all these symbols. This is quite the opposite of the illustration
in the book of some short section of the Principia Mathematica (see illustration above) that is unreadable
because it has only symbols. It was also Descartes who started using letters a, b, c, . . . for constants and
x, y, z, . . . for variables or unknowns.
Adhemar Bultheel