Klaus Mainzer

Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus

Friedrich Hirzebruch

Max Koecher

Jürgen Neukirch

Reinhold Remmert

Hans Hermes

Alexander Prestel

A book about numbers sounds rather dull. This one is not. Instead it is a lively story about one thread of mathematics-the concept of "number" told by eight authors and organized into a historical narrative that leads the reader from ancient Egypt to the late twentieth century. It is a story that begins with some of the simplest ideas of mathematics and ends with some of the most complex. It is a story that mathematicians, both amateur and professional, ought to know. Why write about numbers? Mathematicians have always found it diffi cult to develop broad perspective about their subject. While we each view our specialty as having roots in the past, and sometimes having connec tions to other specialties in the present, we seldom see the panorama of mathematical development over thousands of years. Numbers attempts to give that broad perspective, from hieroglyphs to K-theory, from Dedekind cuts to nonstandard analysis.

Numbers

Antonio J. Engler

Absolute values and their completions – such as the p-adic number fields – play an important role in number theory. Krull's generalization of absolute values to valuations made possible applications in other branches of mathematics. In valuation theory, the notion of completion must be replaced by that of "Henselization". This book develops the theory of valuations as well as of Henselizations, based on the skills of a standard graduate course in algebra.

Valued Fields

Alexander Prestel

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