Summary

This book masterfully illustrates the life course of numbers, taking the reader on a walk through a museum of historical artifacts, manuscripts, and works of art. The authors recount how numbers lived in now extinct civilizations, with photographs of archaeological remains, Roman coins, preromanic manuscripts, incunabula; how people learned to use numbers to count, showing Renaissance mercantile arithmetic books; and how numbers evolved into the Western counting system that we use today, with the first recorded usage of the current arithmetic symbols. The authors explore not only the history and use of numbers, but also the physical shape of numbers assumed in writing, including their life at the printing presses at the height of the Renaissance, and in prints of Leonardo da Vinci and Durero, typographical designs, and both celestial and terrestrial maps.