The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics

by Robson, Eleanor; Stedall, Jacqueline

• ISBN13: 9780199213122
• ISBN10: 0199213127
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This Handbook explores the history of mathematics under a series of themes which raise new questions about what mathematics has been and what it has meant to practice it. It addresses questions of who creates mathematics, who uses it, and how. A broader understanding of mathematical practitioners naturally leads to a new appreciation of what counts as a historical source. Material and oral evidence is drawn upon as well as an unusual array of textual sources. Further, the ways in which people have chosen to express themselves are as historically meaningful as the contents of the mathematics they have produced. Mathematics is not a fixed and unchanging entity. New questions, contexts, and applications all influence what counts as productive ways of thinking. Because the history of mathematics should interact constructively with other ways of studying the past, the contributors to this book come from a diverse range of intellectual backgrounds in anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and literature, as well as history of mathematics more traditionally understood. The thirty-six self-contained, multifaceted chapters, each written by a specialist, are arranged under three main headings: 'Geographies and Cultures', 'Peoples and Practices', and 'Interactions and Interpretations'. Together they deal with the mathematics of 5000 years, but without privileging the past three centuries, and an impressive range of periods and places with many points of cross-reference between chapters. The key mathematical cultures of North America, Europe, the Middle East, India, and China are all represented here as well as areas which are not often treated in mainstream history of mathematics, such as Russia, the Balkans, Vietnam, and South America.

Author Biography

Eleanor Robson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is the author of Mesopotamian mathematics, 2100-1600 BC (1999), Mathematics in ancient Iraq: a social history (2008), and many articles on the socio-intellectual history of the cuneiform world. She is co-director of an AHRC-funded project on the geography of knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia. Jacqueline Stedall is Junior Research Fellow in Mathematics at The Queen's College, Oxford. Her research focuses on European mathematics from the 16th century to the 18th with a special interest in the development of algebra. Recent publications include Mathematics Emerging: a sourcebook, 1540-1900 (2008) and The 'Magisteria magna' of Thomas Harriot (2008, with Janet Beery). She is also editor of the BSHSM Bulletin, journal of the British Society of the History of Mathematics.

Table of Contents

IntroductionEleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall

Geographies and Cultures: Global

What was mathematics in the ancient world? Greek and Chinese perspectives

Mathematics and authority: a case study in New and Old World accounting

Heavenly learning, statecraft, and scholarship: the Jesuits and their mathematics in China

The internationalization of mathematics in a world of nations, 1800-1960

Geographies and Cultures: Regional

The two cultures of mathematics in ancient Greece

Tracing mathematical networks in seventeenth-century England

Mathematics and mathematics education in traditional Vietnam

A Balkan trilogy: mathematics in the Balkans before the First World War

Geographies and Cultures: Local

Mathematics education in an Old Babylonian scribal school

The archaeology of mathematics in an ancient Greek city

Engineering the Neapolitan state

Observatory mathematics in the nineteenth century

People and Practices: Lives

Patronage of the mathematical sciences in Islamic societies

John Aubrey and the 'Lives of our English mathematical writers'

Introducing mathematics, building an empire: Russia under Peter I

Human computers in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain

People and Practices: Practices

Mixing, building, and feeding: mathematics and technology in ancient Egypt

Siyaq: numerical notation in the Persianate world

Learning arithmetic: textbooks and their users in England 1500-1900

Algorithms and automation: mathematics and weaving

People and Practices: Presentation

The cognitive and cultural foundations of numbers

Sanskrit mathematical verse

Antiquity, nobility, and utility: picturing the Early Modern mathematical sciences

Writing the ultimate mathematical textbook: Nicolas Bourbaki's Elements de mathematique

Interactions and Interpretations: Intellectual

The cognitive and cultural foundations of numbers

Mathematics in fourteenth-century theology

Mathematics, music, and experiment in late seventeenth-century England

Modernism in mathematics

Interactions and Interpretations: Mathematical

The transmission of the Elements to the Latin West: three case studies

'Gigantic implements of war': images of Newton as a mathematician

From cascades to calculus: Rolle's Theorem

Abstraction and application: new contexts, new interpretations in twentieth-century mathematics

Interactions and Interpretations: Historical

Traditions and myths in the historiography of Egyptian mathematics

Reading ancient Greek mathematics

Number, shape, and the nature of space: thinking through Islamic art

The historiography and history of mathematics in the Third Reich

About the contributors

Index

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