A Concise History of Mathematics

"I once attended a lecture by Dirk Struik, delivered with great clarity and without notes – a remarkable performance, given that the speaker was then 104 years old! Although there are many fine books on the history of mathematics, such as the excellent texts of Victor Katz (‘History of Mathematics: An Introduction’) and David Burton (‘The History of Mathematics’), I’ve always had a soft spot for Struik’s down-to-earth and straightforward paperback, which first appeared in 1948 and which I regard as a classic. Indeed, when I once taught a history of mathematics course in the USA, I was both surprised and delighted when some students declared that they preferred it to the fuller and more up-to-date treatments of the subject to be found in more recent works."