Algebra emerged early in recorded history, stepping aside from the declarative to create the interrogative, a process that has led to fascination and even obsession. Derbyshire, a mathematician and linguist by education and systems analyst by profession, starts with the algebra of about 4,000 years ago and works up to Diophantus, whose place as the father of algebra may be disputed but whose contributions nevertheless are universally admired, then through Hypatia, Cardano, Descartes, Newton, von Leibniz, Lagrange, Cauchy, Abel, Galois, Riemann, Lie, Poincaré, Hilbert, NoetherLefschetz, Zariski, MacLane and Grothendieck, along with a host of other luminaries, giving readers accessible descriptions of their discoveries and even providing non-specialists with extra help on basics such as vector spaces, field theory and algebraic geometry. The result is concise, readable, and enjoyable. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)