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Books > Science & Mathematics > Mathematics > History of mathematics
This volume presents different conceptions of logic and mathematics and discuss their philosophical foundations and consequences. This concerns first of all topics of Wittgenstein's ideas on logic and mathematics; questions about the structural complexity of propositions; the more recent debate about Neo-Logicism and Neo-Fregeanism; the comparison and translatability of different logics; the foundations of mathematics: intuitionism, mathematical realism, and formalism. The contributing authors are Matthias Baaz, Francesco Berto, Jean-Yves Beziau, Elena Dragalina-Chernya, Gunther Eder, Susan Edwards-McKie, Oliver Feldmann, Juliet Floyd, Norbert Gratzl, Richard Heinrich, Janusz Kaczmarek, Wolfgang Kienzler, Timm Lampert, Itala Maria Loffredo D'Ottaviano, Paolo Mancosu, Matthieu Marion, Felix Muhlhoelzer, Charles Parsons, Edi Pavlovic, Christoph Pfisterer, Michael Potter, Richard Raatzsch, Esther Ramharter, Stefan Riegelnik, Gabriel Sandu, Georg Schiemer, Gerhard Schurz, Dana Scott, Stewart Shapiro, Karl Sigmund, William W. Tait, Mark van Atten, Maria van der Schaar, Vladimir Vasyukov, Jan von Plato, Jan Wolenski and Richard Zach.
This book explores the work of Bernhard Riemann and its impact on mathematics, philosophy and physics. It features contributions from a range of fields, historical expositions, and selected research articles that were motivated by Riemann's ideas and demonstrate their timelessness. The editors are convinced of the tremendous value of going into Riemann's work in depth, investigating his original ideas, integrating them into a broader perspective, and establishing ties with modern science and philosophy. Accordingly, the contributors to this volume are mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and historians of science. The book offers a unique resource for students and researchers in the fields of mathematics, physics and philosophy, historians of science, and more generally to a wide range of readers interested in the history of ideas.
Menahem Max Schiffer, a mathematician of many interests, produced a body of work including topics on geometric function theory, Riemann surfaces, and partial differential equations, with a focus on applications and mathematical physics. Perhaps his best known work is that in the calculus of variations, especially extremal problem, s which find application in many scientific areas. This two volume set presents over 50 of the most groundbreaking contributions of this beloved mathematician. All of the reprints of Schiffer s works herein have extensive annotation and invited commentaries, giving new clarity and insight into the impact and legacy of Schiffer's works. A complete bibliography and brief biography make this a rounded and invaluable reference."
The twentieth century is the period during which the history of Greek mathematics reached its greatest acme. Indeed, it is by no means exaggerated to say that Greek mathematics represents the unique field from the wider domain of the general history of science which was included in the research agenda of so many and so distinguished scholars, from so varied scientific communities (historians of science, historians of philosophy, mathematicians, philologists, philosophers of science, archeologists etc. ), while new scholarship of the highest quality continues to be produced. This volume includes 19 classic papers on the history of Greek mathematics that were published during the entire 20th century and affected significantly the state of the art of this field. It is divided into six self-contained sections, each one with its own editor, who had the responsibility for the selection of the papers that are republished in the section, and who wrote the introduction of the section. It constitutes a kind of a Reader book which is today, one century after the first publications of Tannery, Zeuthen, Heath and the other outstanding figures of the end of the 19th and the beg- ning of 20th century, rather timely in many respects.
Drawing on entirely new evidence, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts in England 1580-1630 examines the history of English dramatic form and its relationship to the mathematics, technology, and early scientific thought during the Renaissance period. The book demonstrates how practical modes of thinking that were typical of the sixteenth century resulted in new genres of plays and a new vocabulary for problems of poetic representation. In the epistemological moment the book recovers, we find new ideas about form and language that would become central to Renaissance literary discourse; in this same moment, too, we find new ways of thinking about the relationship between theory and practice that are typical of modernity, new attitudes towards spatial representation, and a new interest in both poetics and mathematics as distinctive ways of producing knowledge about the world. By emphasizing the importance of theatrical performance, the book engages with continuing debates over the cultural function of the early modern stage and with scholarship on the status of modern authorship. When we consider playwrights in relation to the theatre rather than the printed book, they appear less as "authors" than as figures whose social position and epistemological presuppositions were very similar to the craftsmen, surveyors, and engineers who began to flourish during the sixteenth century and whose mathematical knowledge made them increasingly sought after by men of wealth and power.
The manuscript gives a coherent and detailed account of the theory of series in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It provides in one place an account of many results that are generally to be found - if at all - scattered throughout the historical and textbook literature. It presents the subject from the viewpoint of the mathematicians of the period, and is careful to distinguish earlier conceptions from ones that prevail today.
This two volume set presents over 50 of the most groundbreaking contributions of Menahem M Schiffer. All of the reprints of Schiffer's works herein have extensive annotation and invited commentaries, giving new clarity and insight into the impact and legacy of Schiffer's work. A complete bibliography and brief biography make this a rounded and invaluable reference.
Written by a distinguished specialist in functional analysis, this book presents a comprehensive treatment of the history of Banach spaces and (abstract bounded) linear operators. Banach space theory is presented as a part of a broad mathematics context, using tools from such areas as set theory, topology, algebra, combinatorics, probability theory, logic, etc. Equal emphasis is given to both spaces and operators. The book may serve as a reference for researchers and as an introduction for graduate students who want to learn Banach space theory with some historical flavor.
This book presents the contributions of the 20th century to economic theory in a mathematical language and in historical sequence. General equilibrium is the focal point of the book; but also a number of macroeconomic models, especially with respect to the first half of the century, are considered. Dynamic models are extensively studied per se, and not merely as extensions of their static counterparts. The book with its extensive bibliography gives a broad view over the developments in mathematical economics and is therefore an invaluable source of information for researchers and students working in this field.
Gian-Carlo Rota was born in Vigevano, Italy, in 1932. He died in Cambridge, Mas sachusetts, in 1999. He had several careers, most notably as a mathematician, but also as a philosopher and a consultant to the United States government. His mathe matical career was equally varied. His early mathematical studies were at Princeton (1950 to 1953) and Yale (1953 to 1956). In 1956, he completed his doctoral thesis under the direction of Jacob T. Schwartz. This thesis was published as the pa per "Extension theory of differential operators I", the first paper reprinted in this volume. Rota's early work was in analysis, more specifically, in operator theory, differ ential equations, ergodic theory, and probability theory. In the 1960's, Rota was motivated by problems in fluctuation theory to study some operator identities of Glen Baxter (see [7]). Together with other problems in probability theory, this led Rota to study combinatorics. His series of papers, "On the foundations of combi natorial theory", led to a fundamental re-evaluation of the subject. Later, in the 1990's, Rota returned to some of the problems in analysis and probability theory which motivated his work in combinatorics. This was his intention all along, and his early death robbed mathematics of his unique perspective on linkages between the discrete and the continuous. Glimpses of his new research programs can be found in [2,3,6,9,10].
This volume presents a selection of papers by Henry P. McKean, which illustrate the various areas in mathematics in which he has made seminal contributions. Topics covered include probability theory, integrable systems, geometry and financial mathematics. Each paper represents a contribution by Prof. McKean, either alone or together with other researchers, that has had a profound influence in the respective area.
Mathematics Across Cultures: A History of Non-Western Mathematics consists of essays dealing with the mathematical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Inca, Egyptian, and African mathematics, among others, the book includes essays on Rationality, Logic and Mathematics, and the transfer of knowledge from East to West. The essays address the connections between science and culture and relate the mathematical practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both the history of science and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
Hermann Gunther Gramann was one of the 19th century's most remarkable scientists, but many aspects of his life have remained in the dark. This book assembles essential, first-hand information on the Gramann family. It sheds light on the family's struggle for scientific knowledge, progress and education. It puts a face on the protagonists of an exciting development in the history of science. And it highlights the peculiar set of influences which led Hermann Gramann to brilliant insights in mathematics, philology and physics. This book of sources is meant to complement the biography of Gramann and the proceedings of the 2009 Gramann Bicentennial Conference (Birkhauser 2010). "Roots and Traces" will interest all scholars working on Hermann Gramann and related topics. It offers newly discovered pictures of family members, historical texts documenting life in this exceptional family and an English translation of these previously unpublished papers. Text in German and English.
The Mathematics of Measurement is a historical survey of the introduction of mathematics to physics and of the branches of mathematics that were developed specifically for handling measurements, including dimensional analysis, error analysis, and the calculus of quantities.
Leon Ehrenpreis has been one of the leading mathematicians in the twentieth century. His contributions to the theory of partial differential equations were part of the golden era of PDEs, and led him to what is maybe his most important contribution, the Fundamental Principle, which he announced in 1960, and fully demonstrated in 1970. His most recent work, on the other hand, focused on a novel and far reaching understanding of the Radon transform, and offered new insights in integral geometry. Leon Ehrenpreis died in 2010, and this volume collects writings in his honor by a cadre of distinguished mathematicians, many of which were his collaborators.
Euler was not only by far the most productive mathematician in the history of mankind, but also one of the greatest scholars of all time. He attained, like only a few scholars, a degree of popularity and fame which may well be compared with that of Galilei, Newton, or Einstein. Moreover he was a cosmopolitan in the truest sense of the word; he lived during his first twenty years in Basel, was active altogether for more than thirty years in Petersburg and for a quarter of a century in Berlin. Leonhard Euler's unusually rich life and broadly diversified activity in the immediate vicinity of important personalities which have made history, may well justify an exposition. This book is based in part on unpublished sources and comes right out of the current research on Euler. It is entirely free of formulae as it has been written for a broad audience with interests in the history of culture and science.
This book presents new insights into Leibniz's research on planetary theory and his system of pre-established harmony. Although some aspects of this theory have been explored in the literature, others are less well known. In particular, the book offers new contributions on the connection between the planetary theory and the theory of gravitation. It also provides an in-depth discussion of Kepler's influence on Leibniz's planetary theory and more generally, on Leibniz's concept of pre-established harmony. Three initial chapters presenting the mathematical and physical details of Leibniz's works provide a frame of reference. The book then goes on to discuss research on Leibniz's conception of gravity and the connection between Leibniz and Kepler.
China's most sophisticated system of computational astronomy was created for a Mongol emperor who could neither read nor write Chinese, to celebrate victory over China after forty years of devastating war. This book explains how and why, and reconstructs the observatory and the science that made it possible. For two thousand years, a fundamental ritual of government was the emperor's "granting the seasons" to his people at the New Year by issuing an almanac containing an accurate lunisolar calendar. The high point of this tradition was the "Season-granting system" (Shou-shih li, 1280). Its treatise records detailed instructions for computing eclipses of the sun and moon and motions of the planets, based on a rich archive of observations, some ancient and some new. Sivin, the West's leading scholar of the Chinese sciences, not only recreates the project's cultural, political, bureaucratic, and personal dimensions, but translates the extensive treatise and explains every procedure in minimally technical language. The book contains many tables, illustrations, and aids to reference. It is clearly written for anyone who wants to understand the fundamental role of science in Chinese history. There is no comparable study of state science in any other early civilization.
Discussions of the foundations of mathematics and their history are frequently restricted to logical issues in a narrow sense, or else to traditional problems of analytic philosophy. From Dedekind to GAdel: Essays on the Development of the Foundations of Mathematics illustrates the much greater variety of the actual developments in the foundations during the period covered. The viewpoints that serve this purpose included the foundational ideas of working mathematicians, such as Kronecker, Dedekind, Borel and the early Hilbert, and the development of notions like model and modelling, arbitrary function, completeness, and non-Archimedean structures. The philosophers discussed include not only the household names in logic, but also Husserl, Wittgenstein and Ramsey. Needless to say, such logically-oriented thinkers as Frege, Russell and GAdel are not entirely neglected, either. Audience: Everybody interested in the philosophy and/or history of mathematics will find this book interesting, giving frequently novel insights.
Every age and every culture has relied on the incorporation of mathematics in their works of architecture to imbue the built environment with meaning and order. Mathematics is also central to the production of architecture, to its methods of measurement, fabrication and analysis. This two-volume edited collection presents a detailed portrait of the ways in which two seemingly different disciplines are interconnected. Over almost 100 chapters it illustrates and examines the relationship between architecture and mathematics. Contributors of these chapters come from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds: architects, mathematicians, historians, theoreticians, scientists and educators. Through this work, architecture may be seen and understood in a new light, by professionals as well as non-professionals.Volume I covers architecture from antiquity through Egyptian, Mayan, Greek, Roman, Medieval, Inkan, Gothic and early Renaissance eras and styles. The themes that are covered range from symbolism and proportion to measurement and structural stability. From Europe to Africa, Asia and South America, the chapters span different countries, cultures and practices.
* Examines the history and philosophy of the mathematical sciences in a cultural context, tracing their evolution from ancient times up to the twentieth century * 176 articles contributed by authors of 18 nationalities * Chronological table of main events in the development of mathematics * Fully integrated index of people, events and topics * Annotated bibliographies of both classic and contemporary sources * Unique coverage of Ancient and non-Western traditions of mathematics
Apollonius's Conics was one of the greatest works of advanced mathematics in antiquity. The work comprised eight books, of which four have come down to us in their original Greek and three in Arabic. By the time the Arabic translations were produced, the eighth book had already been lost. In 1710, Edmond Halley, then Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, produced an edition of the Greek text of the Conics of Books I-IV, a translation into Latin from the Arabic versions of Books V-VII, and a reconstruction of Book VIII. The present work provides the first completeEnglish translation of Halley's reconstruction of Book VIII withsupplementary notes on the text. It also contains 1)an introduction discussing aspects of Apollonius's Conics 2) an investigation of Edmond Halley's understanding ofthe nature of his venture into ancient mathematics, and 3) anappendices giving a brief account of Apollonius's approach to conic sections and his mathematical techniques. This book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the history ofancientGreekmathematics and mathematics in the early modern period."
Philanthropies funded by the Rockefeller family have been prominent in the social history of the twentieth century for their involvement in medicine and applied science. This book provides the first detailed study of their relatively brief but nonetheless influential foray into the field of mathematics. The careers of a generation of pathbreakers in modern mathematics, such as S.Banach, B.L.van der Waerden and Andre Weil, were decisively affected by their becoming fellows of the Rockefeller-funded International Education Board in the 1920s. To help promote cooperation between physics and mathematics Rockefeller funds supported the erection of the new Mathematical Institute in Gottingen between 1926 and 1929, while the rise of probability and mathematical statistics owes much to the creation of the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris by American philanthropy at about the same time. This account draws upon the documented evaluation processes behind these personal and institutional involvements of philanthropies. It not only sheds light on important events in the history of mathematics and physics of the 20th century but also analyzes the comparative developments of mathematics in Europe and the United States. Several of the documents are given in their entirety as significant witnesses to the gradual shift of the centre of world mathematics to the USA. This shift was strengthened by the Nazi purge of German and European mathematics after 1933 to which the Rockefeller Foundation reacted with emergency programs that subsequently contributed to the American war effort. The general historical and political background of the events discussed in this book is the mixture of competition and cooperation between the various European countries and the USA after World War I, and the consequences of the Nazi dictatorship after 1933. Ideological positions of both the philanthropists and mathematicians mattered heavily in that process. Cultural bias in the selection of fellows and of disciplines supported, and the economic predominance of American philanthropy, led among other things to a restriction of the programs to Europe and America, to an uneven consideration of European candidates, and to preferences for Americans. Political self-isolation of the Soviet Union contributed to an increasing alienation of that important mathematical culture from Western mathematics. By focussing on a number of national cultures the investigation aims to represent a step toward a true inter-cultural comparison in mathematics."
In the early modern period, a crucial transformation occurred in the classical conception of number and magnitude. Traditionally, numbers were merely collections of discrete units that measured some multiple. Magnitude, on the other hand, was usually described as being continuous, or being divisible into parts that are infinitely divisible. This traditional idea of discrete number versus continuous magnitude was challenged in the early modern period in several ways. This detailed study explores how the development of algebraic symbolism, logarithms, and the growing practical demands for an expanded number concept all contributed to a broadening of the number concept in early modern England. An interest in solving practical problems was not, in itself, enough to cause a generalisation of the number concept. It was the combined impact of novel practical applications together with the concomitant development of such mathematical advances as algebraic notation and logarithms that produced a broadened number concept.
This monograph investigates the development of hydrostatics as a science. In the process, it sheds new light on the nature of science and its origins in the Scientific Revolution. Readers will come to see that the history of hydrostatics reveals subtle ways in which the science of the seventeenth century differed from previous periods. The key, the author argues, is the new insights into the concept of pressure that emerged during the Scientific Revolution. This came about due to contributions from such figures as Simon Stevin, Pascal, Boyle and Newton. The author compares their work with Galileo and Descartes, neither of whom grasped the need for a new conception of pressure. As a result, their contributions to hydrostatics were unproductive. The story ends with Newton insofar as his version of hydrostatics set the subject on its modern course. He articulated a technical notion of pressure that was up to the task. Newton compared the mathematical way in hydrostatics and the experimental way, and sided with the former. The subtleties that lie behind Newton's position throws light on the way in which developments in seventeenth-century science simultaneously involved mathematization and experimentation. This book serves as an example of the degree of conceptual change that new sciences often require. It will be of interest to those involved in the study of history and philosophy of science. It will also appeal to physicists as well as interested general readers. |
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