Indice: Foreword / by Ian Stewart. Preface. 1. Year zero 2. Watchers of the skies 3. The pythagorean theorem 4. The elements 5. Ten computational canons 6. Mathematical sutras 7. The house of wisdom 8. The liberal arts 9. The renaissance perspective 10. Mathematics for the common wealth 11. The marriage of algebra and geometry 12. The clockwork universe 13. Mathematics in motion 14. Oceans and stars 15. The quintic 16. New geometries 17. Dialects of algebra 18. Fields of action 19. Catching infinity 20. Of dice and genes 21. War games 22. Mathematics and modern art 23. Machine codes 24. Chaos and complexity. Acknowledgements & select bibliography. Index