For several centuries, clever Westerners praised their spiritual ancestors in ancient India for inventing the zero: How else are you supposed to know what you have (in the positive sense) or what is missing (in the negative sense) when there is no boundary between the two, and is it just "nothing", which actually doesn't exist?

However, the praise was premature, as now not only children from the book “Mathematik.

The Story of Ideas and Discoveries” by Josif Rybakow, Marija Astrina and the illustrator Natalja Jaskina.

Because the Mayan civilization worked with something that corresponds to our "0" seven hundred years before classical Indian mathematics.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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This idea of ​​"working" is the key with which the book appropriates the world and regional history of exact thinking.

It never asks flatly: “What is a number, what is a triangle?”, because it knows that the platitude of this question is the cover on a deep well into which many a philosophy has fallen in the history of philosophy since Pythagoras and is never to be seen again obscure has disappeared.

Instead of taking this risk, where there isn't much practical value to be gained, the book wants to know and show what you can think and do with numbers, triangles and other mathematical objects.

There are also pictures: Ms. Jaskina uses the colors to create their contours, a very mathematical process.

The pictures mainly show people, you can already see a lot of them on the inside of the cover when you open the volume: famous heads, between which colorful threads form a web that, based on the names of central subjects such as “algebra” or “geometry”, forms the network of the historical understanding.

Diophantos, Leibniz, Al-Chwarizmi: From a distance it looks like a lump, but if you get closer, it becomes a tangle, and if you unravel it in the course of reading, clarity emerges.

References are very helpful – if, for example, page 7 says how people learn to count, then page 145 with Cantor's set theory beckons in the same place.

As didactic as this forward and backward mirroring of ideas may seem, it contains above all a healthy, historically conscious realism: Mathematical truth-seeking is a social enterprise that sometimes takes place in leaps and bounds, is prone to failure and requires debate, as the book shows with a large bouquet of significant examples, for example in the genesis of the modern fundamentals debate at a 1900 congress where David Hilbert presented the world community of professionals with his famous twenty-three homework assignments for a future that is still ongoing today.

Since then, it has become increasingly clear that mathematics is the best picture of the space in which we think precisely.

The progress of the subject has made this pictorial relationship more abstract, but also more transparent;

not only the specialization, but also the overview is growing.

In the end, that might come off badly in the book;

instead of stars who have made important individual achievements like Andrew Wiles or Grigori Perelman, one should perhaps have introduced people like Robert Langlands, who work on the said overview.

But that's almost a question of taste, considering that young people's books about research are always more than summaries of the known, namely birthplaces of the new that will one day occur to young audiences.

Josif Rybakow, Marija Astrina: "Mathematics".

The history of ideas and discoveries.

Illustrated by Natalia Jaskina.

Translated from the Russian by Edmund Jacoby.

Jacoby & Stuart, Berlin 2022. 160 p., hardcover, 20 euros.

From 10 years