Mathematics: An Illustrated History of Numbers

100 breakthroughs that changed history

The thoughts and deeds of great thinkers always make great stories, and here are a hundred of the most significant. Each story relates a confounding puzzle that became a discovery and changed the way we see the world. We call these Ponderables.

Knowledge does not arrive fully formed, it takes many minds to puzzle over the evidence and, step by step, edge ever closer to the truth. Here we track the work of history's greatest mathematicians, ancient and modern. Our story includes the most famous math men of all: Pythagoras, who love of numbers led to a violent and death and made him perhaps a murders; Fibo nacci, whose guide for bookkeepers changed the way we add; and Descartes, who took inspiration from ma fly to convert numbers into shapes and back again - changing math for ever.

Take a journey that goes beyond school-day sums and get a glimpse of the true power of mathematics.