Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1384200
A. Moktefi
Private libraries of scientists offer valuable information on their character, work, and acquaintances. Charles L Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) constructed an impressive library of several thousand volumes. The sale catalogue of Carroll's library reveals that it contained at his death most of the major logic works that would be expected for a British mathematical logician of the time. However, there is dispute as to the presence of the most important logic book of all: George Boole's Laws of thought (1854). The absence of this work would make both an unfortunate and an intriguing gap. This paper explains the source of this dispute and introduces a new argument from the sale catalogues centred on the dissemination of the books after the sale of the library.
{"title":"Did Lewis Carroll own a copy of George Boole's Laws of thought? An argument from the sale catalogues","authors":"A. Moktefi","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1384200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1384200","url":null,"abstract":"Private libraries of scientists offer valuable information on their character, work, and acquaintances. Charles L Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) constructed an impressive library of several thousand volumes. The sale catalogue of Carroll's library reveals that it contained at his death most of the major logic works that would be expected for a British mathematical logician of the time. However, there is dispute as to the presence of the most important logic book of all: George Boole's Laws of thought (1854). The absence of this work would make both an unfortunate and an intriguing gap. This paper explains the source of this dispute and introduces a new argument from the sale catalogues centred on the dissemination of the books after the sale of the library.","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129309319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1384203
{"title":"BSHM meeting: The Practice of Mathematics from the Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1384203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1384203","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131769062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1394715
J. Wess
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.
{"title":"The History of Mathematical Logic: in honour of Ivor Grattan–Guinness","authors":"J. Wess","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1394715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1394715","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"6 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116819041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1394713
S. Pope, L. Rogers
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.
{"title":"Anglo-Danish conference on History of Mathematics in Education: Bath Spa, August 2016","authors":"S. Pope, L. Rogers","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1394713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1394713","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131670549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1286558
A. Karp
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.
{"title":"Mark Vygodsky: several episodes from the life of a scholar","authors":"A. Karp","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1286558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1286558","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127459715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1286559
P. Bussotti
{"title":"Discovery of the First Asteroid, Ceres, by Clifford Cunningham","authors":"P. Bussotti","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1286559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1286559","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131421167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1384202
Robin Wilson
{"title":"BSHM/Lewis Carroll Society: The Mathematical World of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)","authors":"Robin Wilson","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1384202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1384202","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114655951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-11-22DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1394714
Christopher D. Hollings
lin Academy and a paper of 1760 not published until 1766 by the Petersburg Imperial Academy. Articles of Lagrange began in 1762 with his Essai d’une nouvelle m ethode, which recognized the contributions of Bernoulli and Euler. It appeared in theMiscellanea Taurinensia. To be sure that Lagrange received credit for his innovation, Euler did not publish on the subject for another four years. At the close of the book we see Lagrange returning in part to his d-calculus with a paper Sur la m ethode des variations in the 1769 Miscellanea Taurunensia and later treatises. A 1771 memoir by Euler gave a new definition of variation and a necessary condition for a variational integral to be a minimizer or maximizer. The book ends with more recent studies of equilibrium equations, known as Euler–Lagrange equations, for finding minima in variational integrals and with constraints on variational problems.
{"title":"Images of Italian Mathematics in France: The Latin sisters, from Risorgimento to fascism, by Frédéric Brechenmacher et al. (eds)","authors":"Christopher D. Hollings","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1394714","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1394714","url":null,"abstract":"lin Academy and a paper of 1760 not published until 1766 by the Petersburg Imperial Academy. Articles of Lagrange began in 1762 with his Essai d’une nouvelle m ethode, which recognized the contributions of Bernoulli and Euler. It appeared in theMiscellanea Taurinensia. To be sure that Lagrange received credit for his innovation, Euler did not publish on the subject for another four years. At the close of the book we see Lagrange returning in part to his d-calculus with a paper Sur la m ethode des variations in the 1769 Miscellanea Taurunensia and later treatises. A 1771 memoir by Euler gave a new definition of variation and a necessary condition for a variational integral to be a minimizer or maximizer. The book ends with more recent studies of equilibrium equations, known as Euler–Lagrange equations, for finding minima in variational integrals and with constraints on variational problems.","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132648453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-11-20DOI: 10.1080/17498430.2017.1396782
R. Simpson
As readers of the BSHM Bulletin will be aware, Leonardo of Pisa wrote his seminal work on Arithmetic, the Liber Abbaci, in 1202. This enormous work, comprising some 600 pages written in Latin, is c...
{"title":"Finding Fibonacci: the quest to rediscover the forgotten mathematical genius who changed the world, by Keith Devlin","authors":"R. Simpson","doi":"10.1080/17498430.2017.1396782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17498430.2017.1396782","url":null,"abstract":"As readers of the BSHM Bulletin will be aware, Leonardo of Pisa wrote his seminal work on Arithmetic, the Liber Abbaci, in 1202. This enormous work, comprising some 600 pages written in Latin, is c...","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126757998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-10-30DOI: 10.3929/ethz-b-000203726
R. Wagner
{"title":"Mathematical knowledge and the interplay of practices, by José Ferreirós: Princeton University Press, 2016, 360pp, £37.95, ISBN 978-0-691-16751-0","authors":"R. Wagner","doi":"10.3929/ethz-b-000203726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000203726","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":211442,"journal":{"name":"BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116442208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}