A Little History of Mathematics

Chalkdust

16 March 2026

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Snezana Lawrence is a mathematician and historian and the author of A Little History of Mathematics (Waterstones).

Style

A Little History of Mathematics summarises a wide array of mathematical achievements, starting from the earliest known mathematicians and working all the way up to (pretty much) today. A huge number of mathematical characters from history are introduced in the book (many of whom would be familiar to maths enthusiasts, others perhaps not). We spend a page or two with each, learning a few of their key achievements and a summary of their lives. The book certainly presents the history of maths as having consisted of a series of largely unrelated genius insights from a small handful of people; I would have liked to hear more about how these insights built on each other and how human mathematical thought as a whole developed over time.

Control

The book strives to introduce mathematical ideas to its audience as if from scratch: in one of the earlier chapters, we get an explanation of what a fraction is; later on, we get all the way up to Galois theory and more. It’s a noble pursuit but a challenge as you can imagine; I am 13 years deep into my maths education beyond the mandatory and I still don’t know what Galois theory is. Because of the shear amount of maths there is explain in this approach, there’s often not time and space to do it justice: eg only one paragraph is dedicated to Cantor’s diagonal proof, and it is explained purely verbally without diagrams. I imagine someone who first encountered fractions 150 pages ago would have struggled to digest the proof in this format (as would I, had I not already known the argument). It left me wondering who its intended audience was.

Damage

However, the book did have many exceptionally clear and well-articulated explanations of ideas which we might sometimes be inclined to call ‘simple’ but in fact take careful reflection to properly appreciate: for example, in what sense does an equation define a curve or shape? This is given a careful and detailed explanation that I think would bring greater clarity on the topic for many non-mathematicians.

Aggression

I would recommend this as a whistle-stop tour of maths ideas through history explained as simply as possible, but maybe not for someone really interested in the history side of ‘a history of maths’. If you know a fair bit of maths already, it largely focuses on familiar famous characters like Euler, Gauss and Newton. Some time is spent introducing us to female and non-European mathematicians but I thought there could have been more. I also wish it didn’t focus so exclusively on the contributions of a special few—you don’t have to have a theorem named after you to be a mathematician, and questioning the patterns we see around us is as fundamental an aspect of human nature as creating art, music, literature. It’s part of who we are as a species. I would have liked to know more about the mathematical activities of ‘normal’ people.

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