The secret lives of numbers : a hidden history of math's unsung trailblazers / Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell.

First published in the United Kingdom by Viking.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [265]-284) and index.

In the beginning -- The turtle and the emperor -- A town called Alex -- The dawn of time -- On the origin(s) of zero -- The house of wisdom -- The impossible dream -- The (first) calculus pioneers -- Newtonianism for ladies -- A grand synthesis -- The mathematical mermaid -- Revolutions -- = -- Mapping the stars -- Number-crunching-- Epilogue.

"A new history of mathematics focusing on the marginalized voices who propelled the discipline, spanning the globe and thousands of years of untold stories. Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite math's reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong -- warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, renowned math historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell make the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than the narrative we think we know. Their story takes us from Hypatia, one of the first great female mathematicians, whose ideas revolutionized geometry and who was killed for them, to Karen Uhlenbeck, the first woman to win the Abel Prize, math's Nobel. Along the way we travel the globe to meet the brilliant Arabic scholars of the House of Wisdom, a math temple whose destruction in the siege of Baghdad in the thirteenth century was a loss arguably on par with that of the Library of Alexandria; Mādhava of Sangamagrama, the fourteenth-century Indian genius who uncovered the central tenets of calculus three hundred years before Isaac Newton was born; and the Black mathematicians of the Civil Rights era, who played a significant role in dismantling early data-based methods of racial discrimination. A thrilling tour through the richness of mathematics, The Secret Lives of Numbers is an immensely compelling narrative history."--Jacket flap.