e: The Story of a Number, 推荐给高年级的孩子看看

Eli Maor

e: The Story of a Number [1 ed.] 9780691033907, 0-691-03390-0

Princeton University Press

1994

236

English

9 Mb

pdf

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Introduction

e: The Story of a Number is a book about e (2.718281828459045…), sometimes known as Euler’s Number or Euler’s Constant after the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. e: The Story of a Number is an “accessible” math book, rather than a “popular” math book, that tries to teach an advanced topic (really first and second year calculus) to a general audience without requiring accompanying class lectures or even worked problems. This is a difficult undertaking, something we don’t really know how to do well at the calculus and beyond levels. The author, mathematician Eli Maor, tries to make the subject more engaging by including stories about famous mathematicians such as John Napier, usually identified as the discoverer of logarithms, and trying to avoid the dry, pedantic style of math textbooks which turns off so many students. He is partially successful but students who lack a solid grasp of the limit concept and its rigorous definition ( the epsilon [tex] \epsilon [/tex] and delta [tex] \delta [/tex] definition of limit attributed to Cauchy and Weierstrass ) may find key parts of the book hard to understand.