Title: pretty good
Product review: if flawed. Not only do you have to wade through the gentleman amateur flavour of the first couple of hundred pages or so, but Kline manages to describe William Hamilton as 'the greatest English theoretical physicist after Newton'; even an Irishman would concede that the greatest English theoretical physicist after Newton was Maxwell - Hamilton was third. However with the first impact tremors announcing the approach of Leonard Euler, when the technical issues start to thicken, things improve enormously. Kline is clearly in awe of Euler, and does a good job of communicating why awe is appropriate.It is nevertheless fortunate that the history of mathematics, unlike that of science, is a discipline essentially invulnerable to whiggish prejudice.
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