A History of Elementary Mathematics

Dover has done historians and students of mathematics a favour by publishing this long out of print text, from 1917. It was a seminal study of how mathematics developed in the ancient world. Cajori focused on the classical realm of the Mediterranean world. But then also in more recent times, when Europe was in its Dark Ages. He explains how the Arabs and Indians gave their contributions. Especially the role of the Arabs in, albeit inadvertantly, nurturing the maths knowledge painfully accrued in past millenia. Unlike recent texts, there are no snazzy diagrams or whatnot to enliven the narrative. Figures in books were very expensive to arrange in the 1910s. But the writing itself remains lucid.