"The binomial theorem is usually quite rightly considered as one of the most important theorems in the whole of analysis." Thus wrote Bernard Bolzano in 1816 in introducing the first correct proof of Newton's generalisation of a century and a half earlier of a result familiar to us all from elementary algebra. Bolzano's appraisal may surprise the modern reader familiar only with the finite algebraic version of the Binomial Theorem involving positive integral exponents, and may also appear incongruous to one familiar with Newton's series for rational exponents. Yet his statement was a sound judgment back in the day. Here the story of the Binomial Theorem is presented in all its glory, from the early days in India, the Moslem world, and China as an essential tool for root extraction, through Newton's generalisation and its central role in infinite series expansions in the 17th and 18th centuries, and to its rigorous foundation in the 19th. The exposition is well-organised and fairly complete with all the necessary details, yet still readable and understandable for those with a limited mathematical background, say at the Calculus level or just below that. The present book, with its many citations from the literature, will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history or foundations of mathematics.

More than three centuries after its creation, calculus remains a dazzling intellectual achievement and the gateway to higher mathematics. This book charts its growth and development by sampling from the work of some of its foremost practitioners, beginning with Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the late seventeenth century and continuing to Henri Lebesgue at the dawn of the twentieth. Now with a new preface by the author, this book documents the evolution of calculus from a powerful but logically chaotic subject into one whose foundations are thorough, rigorous, and unflinching—a story of genius triumphing over some of the toughest, subtlest problems imaginable. In touring The Calculus Gallery, we can see how it all came to be.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

The manuscript gives a coherent and detailed account of the theory of series in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It provides in one place an account of many results that are generally to be found - if at all - scattered throughout the historical and textbook literature. It presents the subject from the viewpoint of the mathematicians of the period, and is careful to distinguish earlier conceptions from ones that prevail today.

This survey explores the history of the arithmetical triangle, from its roots in Pythagorean arithmetic, Hindu combinatorics, and Arabic algebra to its influence on Newton and Leibniz as well as modern-day mathematicians.