I've read a couple of texts on the history of math. Most of them were dry, a few were very entertaining like Crowe's on Vector Analysis. But I haven't found any

I've read a couple of texts on the history of math. Most of them were dry, a few were very entertaining like Crowe's on Vector Analysis. But I haven't found anything that beats mac tutor. I used to read it nearly everyday many years back. The section on Al-Khwarizmi, a key innovator in algebra shows how laborious the task was (site down linking cache): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nOT6h0c7J2oJ:www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Al-Khwarizmi.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nOT6h0c... a square and 10 roots are equal to 39 units. The question therefore in this type of equation is about as follows: what is the square which combined with ten of its roots will give a sum total of 39? The manner of solving this type of equation is to take one-half of the roots just mentioned. Now the roots in the problem before us are 10. Therefore take 5, which multiplied by itself gives 25, an amount which you add to 39 giving 64. Having taken then the square root of this which is 8, subtract from it half the roots, 5 leaving 3. The number three therefore represents one root of this square, which itself, of course is 9. Nine therefore gives the square.