"The Thomsons of Belfast." BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 33(1), pp. 67–68
"American mathematics 1890–1913: catching up to Europe, by Steve Batterson." BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 33(3), pp. 200–201
The paper discusses the background to and provides a transcription of a letter from Robert Leslie Ellis (1817-59) to William Walton (1813-1901) of 1849 on probability theory.
The Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–65) is often portrayed as an unhappily married alcoholic. We show how this image originated in the 1840s, caused by a combination of the strict social rules of the Victorian era and the then changing drinking habits in Ireland. In the 1880s Hamilton's biographer Graves tried to restore Hamilton's reputation by blaming Lady Hamilton for her husband's habits. This unintentionally caused his biography to become the basis of Hamilton's overall negative image. We argue for a far more positive description of Hamilton's private life. Thereafter we trace the evolution of the negative image using an anecdote about Hamilton's work habits and its increasingly distorted representations.
In this paper I discuss different approaches to past mathematical texts. The question I address is: should we stress the continuity of past mathematics with the mathematics practiced today, or should we emphasize its difference, namely what makes it a product of a distant mathematical culture?
In the twentieth century the theory of games was transformed. It began as an amusing pastime, and ended as a major branch of mathematical research and a key paradigm of economic theory. Here it will be argued that the transformation was the result of the work of mathematicians, such as Ernst Zermelo, John von Neumann and Dénes Kőnig, who also contributed to two other areas of mathematics that were emerging at the same time: the theory of sets and the theory of graphs.
In June 1958, Edward L Kaplan (1920-2006) and Paul Meier (1924-2011) published an innovative statistical method to estimate survival curves when including incomplete observations. The Kaplan-Meier (KM) method became the standard way of reporting patient survival in medical research. For example, the KM method is used in more than 70% of clinical oncology papers. With 44,319 Web of Science(R) citations as of November 2017, the report has become the most-cited statistics publication in the scientific literature. Part I of this report describes the KM method, its strengths and limitations, and the history and evolution of the method. In Part II we recount the biography of the remarkable mathematician Edward L Kaplan, PhD, and his unique contributions during the formulation of the KM method, as well as his contributions to science during his unique and productive career.
We report on the Anglo-Danish History of Mathematics in Education conference, drawing on an article written for the Danish Association of Teachers of Mathematics (LFMK) by Jeanette Axelsen (Vordingborg Gymnasium), Kristian Danielsen (Center for Science Studies, University of Aarhus) and Henrik Kragh Sørensen (Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen). Thirty attendees enjoyed an intense programme of talks and practical workshops over three days in Bath. Teachers from Denmark and England shared their pedagogical developments inspired by the history of mathematics.
Mathematics: the Winton Gallery strives, like any exhibition concerning mathematics, to make meaningful contact between the abstruse realms of mathematics and the viewing audience. Unlike many other exhibitions, this is here accomplished by displaying a rich range of objects that demonstrate the essential role of mathematics in the world by emphasizing connections to the viewers' existing cognitive environments. Through a focus on the ways that mathematical work affects and informs our human world, the exhibition succeeds in connecting a mathematical way of thinking with the lives of the viewing public in a complex and profound way, in exchange for their efforts and attention. While an approach which places the interweave of life and mathematics at its centre may invite worries about the representation of pure mathematics or whether such a strategy insulates the viewer from an understanding of 'real' mathematics, what this exhibition does is to offer a sense of the mind-set that underscores mathematical work. By revealing the implications of this mode of thought, the exhibition encourages the audience to understand their own lives and world in a more mathematically-oriented way, while also encouraging them to understand mathematics in terms of the ways their human world is already formed.
Only when university education is fully open to ‘women on equal terms with men’2 2 The phrase used in all the University Charters as they successively abandoned single-sex provision. is it proper t...
The subject of this paper is Mark Vygodsky, a prominent Soviet mathematician, one of the founders of the Soviet school of the history of mathematics. The paper draws on Vygodsky's surviving archive to develop a better understanding of how the life of a scholar unfolded within the context of Soviet reality. Discussion in the paper is confined to several episodes connected with Vygodsky's work as the author of books for secondary school students and as a mathematics teacher educator. It is argued that an examination of these episodes adds to the existing picture of the time when they took place, by shedding light not only on the significance of the political in a field seemingly distant from politics, but also on the position of the mathematics community and of people interested in mathematics education in general.
Statistics is a field with a fair share of controversies, but the exact nature of these is often difficult to fathom. In my mathematics degree course in the 1960s in an English university we had a ...
logic, and in particular to his method of using a board and counters to sort out logical syllogisms, a method that he frequently taught to young children as a way of encouraging logical thinking. The next talk presented a selection of Dodgson’s mathematical problems and puzzles, given by Edward Wakeling, the editor of Lewis Carroll’s diaries in ten volumes. This was followed by Dodgson’s important work on voting, presented by Iain McLean (Oxford), in which Dodgson built on earlier work by Condorcet and Borda. A supporter of proportional representation, Dodgson used examples to show the deficiencies of various well-known methods of voting, such as first-past-the-post, and also discovered a fairer method of scheduling lawn tennis tournaments, prior to the introduction of seeding. To conclude the formal presentations, the Dodgson expert Francine Abeles (New York, USA) discussed Dodgson’s legacy by addressing the question of how good a mathematician he was, and Mark Richards (London) outlined the bibliographic collection that he is compiling of Dodgson’s mathematical writings. The meeting ended with a question-and-answer session involving all the speakers.
We examine Paul Dirac’s early life in Bristol and the link with his classmate Herbert Charles Wiltshire. We outline Wiltshire’s subsequent career using archives and the few letters which survive between Dirac and Wiltshire.
reorienting toward research, while EliakimHastings Moore built an active department at Chicago, which was research-driven from the start. Batterson’s fourth and fifth chapters describe Osgood’s, Bôcher’s and Moore’s efforts to conduct and promote mathematical research in the USA, including the important role all three (especially Moore) played in the growth of the American Mathematical Society and the training of the next generation of Americanmathematical researchers. The remaining two chapters follow the development of the mathematics department at Princeton University in the first decade of the twentieth century, as well as the movement and accomplishments of George David Birkhoff and other freshly minted American mathematical researchers. The text’s institutional focus accounts for its emphasis on university presidents, especially Charles William Eliot at Harvard and Daniel Coit Gilman at Hopkins, but also William Rainey Harper at Chicago and Thomas Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. In Batterson’s discussion of the institutional landscape crafted by these men are glimpses of cultural considerations as well, both in terms of the broader cultural landscape of the Progressive Era United States and the more local cultures of mathematics departments themselves. The former is hinted at, for example, in Batterson’s mention of the public backlash in response to Gilman’s prioritization of advanced research and graduate education at Hopkins. And the latter is suggested by Batterson’s description of the ‘magic’ of Klein’s lectures at Göttingen (p 8) and the ‘magical environment’ created by Moore, Bolza, and Maschke at Chicago (p 169). Batterson’s book is smoothly written and well researched, drawing from over a dozen archival collections at almost a dozen different institutions. Included are appendices that show the 1849–50 Yale course catalogue as well as the 1905–06 list of graduate mathematics courses at Harvard and Chicago. Along with a handful of expository descriptions of important mathematical results, readers will find awell-crafted account of departments, careers, training and administration during a crucial period in American mathematics.
‘This little book is more ambitious than it looks’ reads the blurb of David Acheson's The Calculus Story. Indeed, as one might expect of a popular book, the font is large, the layout is spacious, t...
