A Social History Of The Nineteenth Century Mathematics
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| Author | : Mehrtens |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 307 |
| Release | : 2012-12-06 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 1468494910 |
During the last few decades historians of science have shown a growing interest in science as a cultural activity and have regarded science more and more as part of the gene ral developments that have occurred in society. This trend has been less evident arnong historians of mathematics, who traditionally concentrate primarily on tracing the develop ment of mathematical knowledge itself. To some degree this restriction is connected with the special role of mathematics compared with the other sciences; mathematics typifies the most objective, most coercive type of knowledge, and there fore seems to be least affected by social influences. Nevertheless, biography, institutional history and his tory of national developments have long been elements in the historiography of mathematics. This interest in the social aspects of mathematics has widened recently through the stu dy of other themes, such as the relation of mathematics to the development of the educational system. Some scholars have begun to apply the methods of historical sociology of knowledge to mathematics; others have attempted to give a ix x Marxist analysis of the connection between mathematics and productive forces, and there have been philosophical studies about the communication processes involved in the production of mathematical knowledge. An interest in causal analyses of historical processes has led to the study of other factors influencing the development of mathematics, such as the f- mation of mathematical schools, the changes in the profes- onal situation of the mathematician and the general cultural milieu of the mathematical scientist.
| Author | : Volker R. Remmert |
| Publisher | : Birkhäuser |
| Total Pages | : 282 |
| Release | : 2016-12-08 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 3319396498 |
This book addresses the historiography of mathematics as it was practiced during the 19th and 20th centuries by paying special attention to the cultural contexts in which the history of mathematics was written. In the 19th century, the history of mathematics was recorded by a diverse range of people trained in various fields and driven by different motivations and aims. These backgrounds often shaped not only their writing on the history of mathematics, but, in some instances, were also influential in their subsequent reception. During the period from roughly 1880-1940, mathematics modernized in important ways, with regard to its content, its conditions for cultivation, and its identity; and the writing of the history of mathematics played into the last part in particular. Parallel to the modernization of mathematics, the history of mathematics gradually evolved into a field of research with its own journals, societies and academic positions. Reflecting both a new professional identity and changes in its primary audience, various shifts of perspective in the way the history of mathematics was and is written can still be observed to this day. Initially concentrating on major internal, universal developments in certain sub-disciplines of mathematics, the field gradually gravitated towards a focus on contexts of knowledge production involving individuals, local practices, problems, communities, and networks. The goal of this book is to link these disciplinary and methodological changes in the history of mathematics to the broader cultural contexts of its practitioners, namely the historians of mathematics during the period in question.
| Author | : A.D.D. Craik |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 433 |
| Release | : 2008-03-21 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 184628791X |
A few years ago, in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, I came across a remarkable but then little-known album of pencil and watercolour portraits. The artist of most (perhaps all) was Thomas Charles Wageman. Created during 1829–1852, these portraits are of pupils of the famous mat- matical tutor William Hopkins. Though I knew much about several of the subjects, the names of others were then unknown to me. I was prompted to discover more about them all, and gradually this interest evolved into the present book. The project has expanded naturally to describe the Cambridge educational milieu of the time, the work of William Hopkins, and the later achievements of his pupils and their contemporaries. As I have taught applied mathematics in a British university for forty years, during a time of rapid change, the struggles to implement and to resist reform in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge struck a chord of recognition. So, too, did debates about academic standards of honours degrees. And my own experiences, as a graduate of a Scottish university who proceeded to C- bridge for postgraduate work, gave me a particular interest in those Scots and Irish students who did much the same more than a hundred years earlier. As a mathematician, I sometimes felt frustrated at having to suppress virtually all of the ? ne mathematics associated with this period: but to have included such technical material would have made this a very different book.
| Author | : Daniel J. Cohen |
| Publisher | : JHU Press |
| Total Pages | : 374 |
| Release | : 2007-04-08 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 0801891868 |
This illuminating history explores the complex relationship between mathematics, religious belief, and Victorian culture. Throughout history, application rather than abstraction has been the prominent driving force in mathematics. From the compass and sextant to partial differential equations, mathematical advances were spurred by the desire for better navigation tools, weaponry, and construction methods. But the religious upheaval in Victorian England and the fledgling United States opened the way for the rediscovery of pure mathematics, a tradition rooted in Ancient Greece. In Equations from God, Daniel J. Cohen captures the origins of the rebirth of abstract mathematics in the intellectual quest to rise above common existence and touch the mind of the deity. Using an array of published and private sources, Cohen shows how philosophers and mathematicians seized upon the beautiful simplicity inherent in mathematical laws to reconnect with the divine and traces the route by which the divinely inspired mathematics of the Victorian era begot later secular philosophies.
| Author | : Eleanor Robson |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 419 |
| Release | : 2020-06-30 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 0691201404 |
This monumental book traces the origins and development of mathematics in the ancient Middle East, from its earliest beginnings in the fourth millennium BCE to the end of indigenous intellectual culture in the second century BCE when cuneiform writing was gradually abandoned. Eleanor Robson offers a history like no other, examining ancient mathematics within its broader social, political, economic, and religious contexts, and showing that mathematics was not just an abstract discipline for elites but a key component in ordering society and understanding the world. The region of modern-day Iraq is uniquely rich in evidence for ancient mathematics because its prehistoric inhabitants wrote on clay tablets, many hundreds of thousands of which have been archaeologically excavated, deciphered, and translated. Drawing from these and a wealth of other textual and archaeological evidence, Robson gives an extraordinarily detailed picture of how mathematical ideas and practices were conceived, used, and taught during this period. She challenges the prevailing view that they were merely the simplistic precursors of classical Greek mathematics, and explains how the prevailing view came to be. Robson reveals the true sophistication and beauty of ancient Middle Eastern mathematics as it evolved over three thousand years, from the earliest beginnings of recorded accounting to complex mathematical astronomy. Every chapter provides detailed information on sources, and the book includes an appendix on all mathematical cuneiform tablets published before 2007.
| Author | : Joseph W. Dauben |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 776 |
| Release | : 2002-09-23 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 9783764361679 |
As an historiographic monograph, this book offers a detailed survey of the professional evolution and significance of an entire discipline devoted to the history of science. It provides both an intellectual and a social history of the development of the subject from the first such effort written by the ancient Greek author Eudemus in the Fourth Century BC, to the founding of the international journal, Historia Mathematica, by Kenneth O. May in the early 1970s.
| Author | : Alexander Karp |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 627 |
| Release | : 2014-01-25 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 146149155X |
This is the first comprehensive International Handbook on the History of Mathematics Education, covering a wide spectrum of epochs and civilizations, countries and cultures. Until now, much of the research into the rich and varied history of mathematics education has remained inaccessible to the vast majority of scholars, not least because it has been written in the language, and for readers, of an individual country. And yet a historical overview, however brief, has become an indispensable element of nearly every dissertation and scholarly article. This handbook provides, for the first time, a comprehensive and systematic aid for researchers around the world in finding the information they need about historical developments in mathematics education, not only in their own countries, but globally as well. Although written primarily for mathematics educators, this handbook will also be of interest to researchers of the history of education in general, as well as specialists in cultural and even social history.
| Author | : H. H. Goldstine |
| Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
| Total Pages | : 427 |
| Release | : 2012-12-06 |
| Genre | : Mathematics |
| ISBN | : 1461381061 |
The calculus of variations is a subject whose beginning can be precisely dated. It might be said to begin at the moment that Euler coined the name calculus of variations but this is, of course, not the true moment of inception of the subject. It would not have been unreasonable if I had gone back to the set of isoperimetric problems considered by Greek mathemati cians such as Zenodorus (c. 200 B. C. ) and preserved by Pappus (c. 300 A. D. ). I have not done this since these problems were solved by geometric means. Instead I have arbitrarily chosen to begin with Fermat's elegant principle of least time. He used this principle in 1662 to show how a light ray was refracted at the interface between two optical media of different densities. This analysis of Fermat seems to me especially appropriate as a starting point: He used the methods of the calculus to minimize the time of passage cif a light ray through the two media, and his method was adapted by John Bernoulli to solve the brachystochrone problem. There have been several other histories of the subject, but they are now hopelessly archaic. One by Robert Woodhouse appeared in 1810 and another by Isaac Todhunter in 1861.
| Author | : Ivor Grattan-Guiness |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 764 |
| Release | : 2004-11-11 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1134888392 |
First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
| Author | : Eleanor Robson |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press on Demand |
| Total Pages | : 927 |
| Release | : 2009 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0199213127 |
This handbook explores the history of mathematics, addressing what mathematics has been and what it has meant to practise it. 36 self-contained chapters provide a fascinating overview of 5000 years of mathematics and its key cultures for academics in mathematics, historians of science, and general historians.
