We measure history—its defining moments, landmark documents, and great figures—by dates. The French Revolution began in 1789, the Magna Carta was originally issued in 1215, and Julius Caesar died in the year 44 BC. What makes these dates correct, though? Is it possible that there is a massive gap in the historical record and that the calendar we use today is off by about 1,000 years? Sparked by a chance meeting at a conference in Mexico more than fifteen years ago, Florin Diacu sets off on a journey into the field of historical chronology to answer these fascinating questions.

This book reads like a detective story, describing in vivid detail Diacu’s adventure back in time as he explores the shocking theory of a lost millennium. He meets a colorful cast of characters along the way. Chief among them is Anatoli Fomenko, a Russian mathematician who supports drastically revising historical chronology based on his extensive research in ancient astronomy, linguistics, cartography, and a crucial manuscript by Ptolemy. Fomenko, however, is not the only one to puzzle over time; Isaac Newton, Voltaire, and Edmund Halley, among others, also enter into this captivating quest.

The Lost Millennium highlights the controversy surrounding the dating of ancient events, a fascinating tale full of mystery, debate, and excitement. Join the author as he pushes further and further in search of the truth.

Florin Diacu is a professor of mathematics at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, author of Megadisasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe; Singularities of the N-body Problem: An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics; and An Introduction to Differential Equations: Order and Chaos, and coauthor of Celestial Encounters: The Origins of Chaos and Stability.

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