The Romance of Mathematics (1886) is a Victorian curiosity of the best kind: a set of mock-serious lectures deriving the ‘social properties of a conic,’ equations for brain-waves, and the laws of political motion. Behind the pen-name P. Hampson stood the Oxford antiquary P. H. Ditchfield, having elaborate fun with the pretensions of both mathematics and society.
Part satire, part genuine affection for the subject, it reads like a don’s after-dinner entertainment that got gloriously out of hand. Download the free EPUB for one of the odder, more charming byways of nineteenth-century mathematical writing.