Rouse Ball W.W. A Short Account of the History of Mathematics

Reptint of the 1908 edition. — New York: Dover, 2010. — 458 p. — ISBN: 0-486-20630-0.The subject-matter of this book is a historical summary of the development of mathematics, illustrated by the lives and discoveries of those to whom the progress of the science is mainly due. It may serve as an introduction to more elaborate works on the subject, but primarily it is intended to give a short and popular account of those leading facts in the history of mathematics which many who are unwilling, or have not the time, to study it systematically may yet desire to know.
The first edition was substantially a transcript of some lectures which I delivered in the year 1888 with the object of giving a sketch of the history, previous to the nineteenth century, that should be intelligible to any one acquainted with the elements of mathematics. In the second edition, issued in 1893, I rearranged parts of it, and introduced a good deal of additional matter.NoteEgyptian and Phoenician MathematicsMathematics Under Greek InfluenceThe Ionian and Pythagorean Schools
The Schools of Athens and Cyzicus
The First Alexandrian School
The Second Alexandrian School
The Byzantine School
Systems of Numeration and Primitive ArithmeticMathematics of the Middle Ages and RenaissanceThe Rise of Learning in Western Europe
The Mathematics of the Arabs
The Introduction of Arab Works into Europe
The Development of Arithmetic
The Mathematics of the Renaissance
The Close of the Renaissance
Modern MathematicsThe History of Modern Mathematics
History of Mathematics from Descartes to Huygens
The Life and Works of Newton
Leibnitz and the Mathematicians of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
Lagrange, Laplace, and their Contemporaries
Mathematics of the Nineteenth Century