Unknown quantity : a real and imagined history of algebra

'Here is the story of algebra.' With this deceptively simple introduction, Unknown Quantity opens, thirty-eight centuries ago, at the time of Abraham and Isaac.

In stylish and accessible prose, Derbyshire shows how the invention of algebra was more than the beginning of a specific discipline of mathematics; it was also the birth of a new way of thinking that altered, forever, the ways in which we see and understand our world.