Customer Reviews

Good, but you have to work at reading it - By: Suffolk Cyclist, 08 Feb 2008
If I had never read any of Eli Maor's excellent books I would have scored this book as 5 stars. It is a very good book that guides you through a series of difficult mathematical concepts without being a textbook. It is very readable, but it is peppered with 'roadblocks' where you suddenly have to pay a lot more attention, & possibly re-read sections, before you can proceed. It also, despite being a new 'bugs removed' edition, has at least one grammatical error which makes a paragraph hard to follow.

Having said all that, it really is a very good book. It is just that I have been spoiled by Eli Maor's books, which cover similar ground (trigonometry, e)in a similar way (history, characters, mathematical ideas, related concepts), but manage to make it an effortless joy for the reader. This book somehow never became a joy to read.

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Disappointing presentation of the material - By: , 14 Oct 2002
I read this book on the back of having just finished Eli Maor's excellent "To infinity & beyond". Unlike Maor's book, "An imaginary tale" is poorly written & presented. While Maor has a fluid & engrossing writing style, Nahin is much less convincing. The material is all there, but it's the presentation with which I have a problem. It's not all bad -- the chapter on the geometry of i is well done, for example, but that's the exception rather than the rule. Another problem is the poor quality of the diagrams. Cubic curves are hastily drawn freehand. Right angled triangles don't always have right angles, & so on. On the whole, I came away with an impression of a book with lots of potential, but most of it left unrealised.

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Eulogy - By: , 23 Aug 1999
I rate this book as one of the three best general mathematical books that I have ever bought. Its style is clear & light & the scope of the mathematics is breathtaking; I learnt a great deal from it & saw explained some hard ideasin a very readable way. Not every question is answered but as the author says it isn't a text book. If you want to get into complex analysis & learn about its development & the geniuses who have been involvedin it I can think of no better path to take-but you will need to work at some bits! The author avoids actually defining complex numbersin a rigorous way & I would have liked to have seen them defined somewhere as ordered pairs of reals with a reasonable definition of addition & a funny definition of multiplication, with i simply a change of notation. Not easy to fit into the historical development but worth an appendix.

Buy the book. If you don't like it I reckon the problem's with you!

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Fantastic! Thorough, scholarly, interesting! - By: , 05 Mar 1999
This is an excellent, beautiful book! Just the section on Kepler's laws is worth the price of the book (hardcover to boot!)

If you like math, if you are willing to spend a bit of time understanding the wonderful results -- get it! Some calculus background needed -- nothing beyond high school.

The book goes well beyond providing a narrative on the history of "square root of -1". It actually showsin complete detail how to use "i" to do wonderful things. Along the way the author provides the important historical events & plenty of notes & references for anyone interestedin getting some more. It is clear the author took his time to research & study the subject. He has presented it well, thouroghly, &in an interesting way -- without sacrificing detail!