Böcker av Robert Kiely

Numbers: A Cultural History provides students with a compelling interdisciplinary view of the development of mathematics and its relationship to world cultures over 4,500 years of human history.Mathematics is often referred to as a "universal language," and that is a fitting description. Many cultures have contributed to mathematics in fascinating ways, but despite its "universal" character, mathematics is also a human endeavor. It has played pivotal roles in societies at particular times; and it has influenced, and been influenced by, a wide range of ideas and institutions, from commerce to philosophy. Ancient Egyptian views of mathematics, for example, are tied closely to engineering and agriculture. Some European Renaissance views, on the other hand, relate the study of number to that of the natural world.Numbers, A Cultural History seeks to place the history of mathematics into a broad cultural context. While it treats mathematical material in detail, it also relates that material to other subject matter: science, philosophy, navigation, commerce, religion, art, and architecture. It examines how mathematical thinking grows in specific cultural settings and how it has shaped those settings in turn. It also explores the movement of ideas between cultures and the evolution of modern mathematics and the quantitative, data-driven world in which we live.

Moving across poem, play, essay - chipping away at their distinctions - Robert Kiely's ROB explores song, grading, vaccines, change, sound, and natural history. What do you remember, and why? How much of your life is determined by biology? Acknowledgments are terminally incomplete, they always must be. So, what can words hold? What if there is not distinction between inside and outside? Who do you love, who do you write to, who do you collaborate with? Kiely's answers are only ROB's. When you read this you'll have to write your own.

Kiely invites the reader of postmodern fiction to travel back to the 19th-century novel without pretending to let go of contemporary expectations. Whilst he does not claim that all fictions begin to look alike, he examines a variety of ways in which new texts reflect on old.