A review by brizreading
A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W. Rouse Ball

2.0

A bite-sized snack of math history, this is an unsatisfying, 30-minute lecture on the origins of mathematical thinking. Despite the title (which made me think this would be a super-panoramic view from Pythagoras to Liebniz), this is essentially 25 minutes about what the ancient Egyptians knew about math (mostly practical arithmetic stuff) with a brief 5 minutes on ancient Chinese math (not much). Bottom line: apparently the ancient Greeks were the ones who started treating math like a science, thinking in terms of deductive reasoning, proofs, theorems, etc. Meh.