e The Story of a Number Book Review
The book e The Story of a Number by Eli Maor is about the history of many mathematical concepts, including the number e. Maor introduces each of the concepts he discusses through first describing the works and personality of the famous mathematicians who discovered or invented each of the concepts and then showing how the mathematicians came up with their discoveries. He relies heavily upon anecdotes about the mathematicians to keep the reader who isn't already absorbed in the math engaged with the text. Overall Maor's purpose seems to be to show that although e's history isn't widely known, it is related to or rooted in many other topics, some of which have much more extensive histories. If a reader didn't look at the title, he might not know the book is about e until he was over half through it. This is most likely due to the fact that there isn't a lot of historical material on e as there is, for example, with π. So Maor begins with the concepts l