A History of Mathematics

Back when I was working on the Leibniz project, I realized that I could do with a better grasp of the history of mathematics.  Deleuze was making all sorts of references to the development of the calculus that I mostly followed, but only more or less.  So, after a bit of research, I settled on this Boyer and Merzbach tome.  It definitely did help me better understand the way that the calculus was originally oriented around infinite series; this has mostly been lost in how it is taught today (well, at least how it was taught 30 years ago).  But I actually found that the most interesting part of the book was the first 300 pages leading up to the calculus.  It was fascinating to read about things like Mesopotamian sexagesimal fractions and the incredible work of Apollonius on the conics.  While it's a cliche, it really does give one a renewed appreciation of how far ahead of their time the Greeks were.  Unfortunately, even though I read it slowly and in small doses, I find it hard to recommend the book as a whole.  While I began reading pretty closely and working out some of the problems myself, by the final 150 pages or so I was mostly just skimming.  Once they go past Euler and Gauss you pretty much need a complete undergraduate education in pure math to follow much of the story.