MATH 335 - History of Mathematics

3 Credit(s)

This course traces the historical development of mathematics from ancient to modern times, placing mathematical facts into a meaningful intellectual and historical context. Typical topics include mathematics in early civilization such as Egypt and Babylonia; early Greek mathematics from Euclid to Archimedes; the work of Diophantus; mathematics in medieval Islam and its transmission to the Latin West; the early development of algebra; the analytic geometry of Descartes and Fermat; the development of the calculus at the hands of Newton and Leibniz; the contributions of the Bernouilli family; nineteenth-century analysis from Cauchy to Weiestrass; nineteenth-century algebra from Galois through Klein; the development of non-Euclidean geometry; and Cantor’s development in set theory.

Prerequisite(s):
MATH 121 Minimum Grade: C- OR T