Description: In this book, Hans Wussing sets out to trace the process of abstraction that led finally to the axiomatic formulation of the abstract notion of group.
Review Quotes: "It is a pleasure to turn to Wussing's book, a sound presentation of history .... The topic of the book is such that less is said about group theory itself than about the subjects in which it grew. These discussions are far from perfunctory; the 13 pages on Galois, for instance, are an excellent study of the spirit of his work. Wussing always gives enough detail to let us understand what each author was doing, and the book could almost serve as a sampler of 19th-century algebra. The bibliography is extremely good, and the prose is sometimes pleasantly epigrammatic."- William C. Waterhouse, "Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society" (review of the German edition)