Max Simon’s Geschichte der Mathematik im Altertum (1909) tells the story of ancient mathematics without detaching it from ancient life: Egyptian rope-stretchers and temple accounts, Babylonian astronomy, and the Greek ascent from Thales to the Alexandrians, all set ‘in Verbindung mit antiker Kulturgeschichte’ — inside the cultures that produced them.
Simon writes as both mathematician and historian, and his cultural framing was ahead of its time. Download the free EPUB — in the original German — for antiquity’s mathematics restored to its world.