| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Helena M. Pycior. Symbols, Impossible Numbers, and Geometric Entanglements: British Algebra through the Commentaries on Newton's Universal Arithmetick. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 328. $74.95.

The study of mathematics in early modern England has failed to attract sustained historical research. The seeming absence of first-rate creative mathematicians before the middle of the seventeenth century resulted in a tendency on the part of historians to elevate practical mathematics to a position of prominence and to maintain both the intrinsic merit of the labors of humble practitioners as well as their contribution to the formation of a glorious British tradition exemplified by John Wallis and Isaac Newton. Conversely, those investigating late seventeenth-century mathematics have tended to focus almost exclusively on the development of calculus in the British Isles to the virtual exclusion of other aspects of contemporary mathematics. Helena M. Pycior set herself the task of offsetting such historiographical imbalance through an account of the fortunes of algebra in England between the late sixteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. . . .

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