“A student of history, who cares little for Greek or mathematics in particular, but who likes to watch how things grow, will be able to extract from these pages a notion of the whole history of mathematical science down to Newton's time…”

— James Gow (scholar)

Preface
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

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James Gow (scholar) 22

scholar 1854–1923

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

“It is true that in recent years a number of attractive histories of mathematics have been published in England and America, but these have only dealt with Greek mathematics as part of the larger subject, and in consequence the writers have been precluded… from presenting the work of the Greeks in suflicient detail. The same remark applies to the German histories of mathematics, even to the great work of Moritz Cantor…”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. vi
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

“The unnaturalness of mathematical symbolism is attested to by history. The algebra of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Hindus, and the Arabs was what is commonly called rhetorical algebra. …on the whole they used ordinary rhetoric to describe their mathematical work. Symbolism is a relatively modern invention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries…”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 59

“Greek mathematics reveals an important aspect of the Greek genius of which the student of Greek culture is apt to lose sight.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. v
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

“It is to be feared that few who are not experts in the history of mathematics have any acquaintance with the details of the original discoveries in mathematics of the greatest mathematician of antiquity, perhaps the greatest mathematical genius that the world has ever seen.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Source: Achimedes (1920), Ch. I. Archimedes, p.1

“Einstein is the only figure in the physical sciences with a stature that can be compared with Newton. Newton is reported to have said "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." This remark is even more true of Einstein who stood on the shoulders of Newton. Both Newton and Einstein put forward a theory of mechanics and a theory of gravity but Einstein was able to base General Relativity on the mathematical theory of curved spaces that had been constructed by Riemann while Newton had to develop his own mathematical machinery. It is therefore appropriate to acclaim Newton as the greatest figure in mathematical physics and the Principia is his greatest achievement.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

"Newton's Principia" in 300 Years of Gravitation. (1987) by S. W. Hawking and W. Israel, p. 4

“The theory of the nature of mathematics is extremely reactionary. We do not subscribe to the fairly recent notion that mathematics is an abstract language based, say, on set theory. In many ways, it is unfortunate that philosophers and mathematicians like Russell and Hilbert were able to tell such a convincing story about the meaning-free formalism of mathematics. In Greek, mathematics simply meant learning, and we have adapted this... to define the term as "learing to decide."”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Mathematics is a way of preparing for decisions through thinking. Sets and classes provide one way to subdivide a problem for decision preparation; a set derives its meaning from decision making, and not vice versa.

C. West Churchman, Leonard Auerbach, Simcha Sadan, Thinking for Decisions: Deductive Quantitative Methods (1975) Preface.
1960s - 1970s

“For the mathematician the important consideration is that the foundations of mathematics and a great portion of its content are Greek. The Greeks laid down the first principles, invented the methods ab initio, and fixed the terminology. Mathematics in short is a Greek science, whatever new developments modern analysis has brought or may bring.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. v
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

“Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

“Economic history matters. Students of economics should read Charles MacKay and Charles Kindleberger, and should study the history of the Wall Street Crash as well as the theory and the mathematics required to formalize it.”

Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell (1955) British businessman

Source: Economics after the crisis : objectives and means (2012), Ch. 2 : Financial Markets: Efficiency, Stability, and Income Distribution

“A student of history, who cares little for Greek or mathematics in particular, but who likes to watch how things grow, will be able to extract from these pages a notion of the whole history of mathematical science down to Newton's time…”

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