I will always think of this book in the way that one thinks of a beloved pet that shows up on the doorstep one day, bedraggled and wagging its tail, not certain what it wants but absolutely certain that you are the person that can provide it. Elwin Street Productions had conceived the idea for a book about the history of mathematical equations and they started looking around for a writer. That’s when the synopsis landed on my doorstep.
The proposed contents actually made me mad; I had a completely different view of what should be in the book. It also took a while to get used to writing a book that began as somebody else’s idea. But in truth, I had been waiting a long time to write a math book, and I knew that I could fix this one up.
So I would first like to thank the people at Elwin Street who tolerated my wholesale changes to their concept, never lost faith in it, and eventually placed the book with the best co-publishers I could ever have asked for, Princeton University Press and NewSouth Publishing.
I would also like to thank, in no particular order:
John Wilkes, the founder of the Science Communication Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who has been a guiding light to so many scientists who wanted to become writers.
Peter Radetsky, one of my teachers at UCSC, who told me, “I think you’re going to have a great adventure.”
Peter Steinhart, who taught essay writing at UCSC, and Rosalind Reid, my first editor at American Scientist, for convincing me that the first person singular pronoun has a place (and a very important one) in science writing.
Martin Gardner, the first popular math writer I ever read, who made it look so effortless.
George Pólya, whose explanation of Euler’s Basel Formula (which I read in college) was like Lake Tahoe: so transparent and yet so deep.
Nisaba, the Sumerian goddess of writing (and indirectly, of mathematics), who got the whole thing started.
And Kay, my wife, who encouraged me to follow my dream of writing and then followed the same dream herself. I have learned from her that writing is much more than putting words on paper.