TITLE: Math History books
QUESTION [12 upvotes]: I'm teaching a course over the summer (it's a sort of make-your-own course for non-majors) and I'm planning on organizing it as a math history course, hitting on major threads through about 1900, and focusing on the evolution of ideas and on people, rather than on the details of proofs.  I've also been having a lot of trouble finding a good book covering this material (none finding books on ancient mathematics, but I want to focus on Renaissance to 19th Century, if possible), and so, here's my question:

What would be a good textbook for a course of this nature? Specifically, for a math history course targeted at non-science majors.

REPLY [3 votes]: The question might use a bifurcation: do you want a systematic treatise or a collection of episodes?
In the latter case, there is Gindikin's Tales of Physicists and Mathematicians. It is a collection of (mostly independent, if my memory doesn't cheat me - I have read parts of the Russian original) "tales" on some particular people and/or developments, mostly pre-1900. History is interlaced with mathematics - but almost all of the latter should be on high school level. Probably this is better used in a student seminar rather than in a lecture course, though.

REPLY [3 votes]: I think Development of mathematics in the 19th century by Felix Klein would be useful.