"A History of Vector Analysis" by Michael J. Crowe

Great book talking about the stories behind the discoveries of the famous property known for its velocity and magnitude in Physics.

When you think of the word "vector," you may think of the vector objects you create from Adobe Illustrator (I'm experienced in 3D motion graphics design via Cinema 4D, so I've heard of this term before). Or, you might think of Isaac Newton's famous equation F=ma—a vector equation. Cool, so what is a vector and who came up with it? Thank goodness for this book by author Crowe, as he guides us through the history of directional magnitudes.

The gentle writing of this book is enough to keep you reading from start to end. That's a huge part because apparently, these old books featured writing styles that make the author sound pretentious and egotistical. That includes them using words that are seldom used today, even by literary scholars. Saying that, it's a breath of fresh air reading through what seemed like an advanced topic in Mathematics. There isn't much pre-requisite to reading this other than understanding algebra and geometry, but other than that, it's readable.

As for the history, it started with one of my personal favorite contributors to Mathematics, by the name of William Rowan Hamilton and his development of complex numbers and quaternions (via parallelograms). Reads like a classic film, I must say. As the author then talks about Hermann Grassmann, it becomes the longest account in talking about a mathematical figure I have ever read. Why is that? When Grassmann made his ideas and contributions public, the math and science communities weren't fans of it. Even Hamilton himself said that his published books "make great waste paper." As time went on, Grassmann passed away, and it wasn't until now that mathematicians contacted Grassmann's son to see if there are any more of his father's copy of his published works still around. Looked like what was wrong with Grassmann's book was it was too philosophical for most to understand. After some time, the sciences went on to accept the publications and contributions from Josiah Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside. Then came the idea of implementing arithmetic and even calculus to the ideas of vectors. It was briefly explained and demonstrated, but enough not to induce frequent yawns from the reader.

It's a relatively simple and great book. I feel this caters to a very exclusive group of people, namely those venturing in the world of math and physics—areas that require the usages and understandings of vectors. The average [American] citizen doesn't know much about the ideas of vectors, so I can see that people who read and enjoy this book are those who have some math prowess in them, and/or are mathematically curious. Nevertheless, it's a welcome into the more deeper waters of mathematics. Don't worry, this book will not make you drown.

Overall, it's the most gentle writing and introduction to the ideas of how vectors came to be. Who said you can't write about an advanced mathematical topic in an easy way? I enjoyed this book a lot.

Give it a read some time!

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he managed a personal blog made back in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming (software development) and video production, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, playing old video/DOS games, digital video archiving, and listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

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