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Books > Science & Mathematics > Mathematics > History of mathematics
This book explores facets of Otto Neugebauer's career, his impact on the history and practice of mathematics, and the ways in which his legacy has been preserved or transformed in recent decades, looking ahead to the directions in which the study of the history of science will head in the twenty-first century. Neugebauer, more than any other scholar of recent times, shaped the way we perceive premodern science. Through his scholarship and influence on students and collaborators, he inculcated both an approach to historical research on ancient and medieval mathematics and astronomy through precise mathematical and philological study of texts, and a vision of these sciences as systems of knowledge and method that spread outward from the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, crossing cultural boundaries and circulating over a tremendous geographical expanse of the Old World from the Atlantic to India.
The aim of this book is to analyse historical problems related to the use of mathematics in physics as well as to the use of physics in mathematics and to investigate "Mathematical Physics" as precisely the new discipline which is concerned with this dialectical link itself. So the main question is: "When and why did the tension between mathematics and physics, explicitly practised at least since Galileo, evolve into such a new scientific theory? " "" The authors explain the various ways in which this science allowed an advanced mathematical modelling in physics on the one hand, and the invention of new mathematical ideas on the other hand. Of course this problem is related to the links between institutions, universities, schools for engineers, and industries, and so it has social implications as well. The link by which physical ideas had influenced the world of mathematics was not new in the 19th century, but it came to a kind of maturity at that time. Recently, much historical research has been done into mathematics and physics and their relation in this period. The purpose of the Symposium and this book is to gather and re-evaluate the current thinking on this subject. It brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and gives much-needed insight in the subject of mathematical physics from a historical point of view.
We bring into full light some excerpts on musical subjects which were until now scattered throughout the most famous scientific texts. The main scientific and musical cultures outside of Europe are also taken into consideration. The first and most important property to underline in the scientific texts examined here is the language they are written in. This means that our multicultural history of the sciences necessarily also becomes a review of the various dominant languages used in the different historical contexts. In this volume, the history of the development of the sciences is told as it happened in real contexts, not in an alienated ideal world.
This open access book examines the many contributions of Paul Lorenzen, an outstanding philosopher from the latter half of the 20th century. It features papers focused on integrating Lorenzen's original approach into the history of logic and mathematics. The papers also explore how practitioners can implement Lorenzen's systematical ideas in today's debates on proof-theoretic semantics, databank management, and stochastics. Coverage details key contributions of Lorenzen to constructive mathematics, Lorenzen's work on lattice-groups and divisibility theory, and modern set theory and Lorenzen's critique of actual infinity. The contributors also look at the main problem of Grundlagenforschung and Lorenzen's consistency proof and Hilbert's larger program. In addition, the papers offer a constructive examination of a Russell-style Ramified Type Theory and a way out of the circularity puzzle within the operative justification of logic and mathematics. Paul Lorenzen's name is associated with the Erlangen School of Methodical Constructivism, of which the approach in linguistic philosophy and philosophy of science determined philosophical discussions especially in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. This volume features 10 papers from a meeting that took place at the University of Konstanz.
Archimedes is held in high esteem by mathematicians, physicists and engineers as one of the most brilliant scientists of all time. These proceedings contain original, unpublished papers with the primary emphasis on the scientific work of Archimedes and his influence on the fields of mathematics, science, and engineering. There are also papers dealing with archaeological aspects and the myths and legends about Archimedes and about the Archimedes Palimpsest. Papers on the following subjects form part of the book: Hydrostatics (buoyancy, fluid pressure and density, stability of floating bodies); Mechanics (levers, pulleys, centers of gravity, laws of equilibrium); Pycnometry (measurement of volume and density); Integral Calculus (Archimedes as the father of the integral calculus, method of exhaustion, approximation of pi, determination of areas and volumes); Mathematical Physics (Archimedes as the father of mathematical physics, Law of the Lever, Law of Buoyancy, Axiomatization of Physics); History of Mathematics and Mechanics (Archimedes' influence in antiquity, the middle ages, the Renaissance, and modern times; his influence on Leonado da Vinci, Galileo, Newton, and other giants of science and mathematics); Ancient Machines and Mechanisms (catapults, water screws, iron hands, compound pulleys, planetaria, water clocks, celestial globes, the Antikythera Mechanism); Archimedean Solids (their rediscovery in the Rennaisance and their applications in materials science and chemistry); Archimedean Legends (how stories of golden crowns, eureka moments, naked runs, burning mirrors, steam cannons, etc., have influenced us through the ages, whether true or not); The Cattle Problem (how its 18th century rediscovery inspired the study of equations with integer solutions); Teaching the Ideas of Archimedes (how his life and works have influenced the teaching of science, mathematics, and engineering).
The essays in this volume concern the points of intersection between analytic philosophy and the philosophy of the exact sciences. More precisely, it concern connections between knowledge in mathematics and the exact sciences, on the one hand, and the conceptual foundations of knowledge in general. Its guiding idea is that, in contemporary philosophy of science, there are profound problems of theoretical interpretation-- problems that transcend both the methodological concerns of general philosophy of science, and the technical concerns of philosophers of particular sciences. A fruitful approach to these problems combines the study of scientific detail with the kind of conceptual analysis that is characteristic of the modern analytic tradition. Such an approach is shared by these contributors: some primarily known as analytic philosophers, some as philosophers of science, but all deeply aware that the problems of analysis and interpretation link these fields together.
Up to now there have been scarcely any publications on Leibniz dedicated to investigating the interrelations between philosophy and mathematics in his thought. In part this is due to the previously restricted textual basis of editions such as those produced by Gerhardt. Through recent volumes of the scientific letters and mathematical papers series of the Academy Edition scholars have obtained a much richer textual basis on which to conduct their studies - material which allows readers to see interconnections between his philosophical and mathematical ideas which have not previously been manifested. The present book draws extensively from this recently published material. The contributors are among the best in their fields. Their commissioned papers cover thematically salient aspects of the various ways in which philosophy and mathematics informed each other in Leibniz's thought.
Galileo and Newton s work towards the mathematisation of the physical world; Leibniz s universal logical calculus; the Enlightenment s mathematique sociale. John von Neumann inherited all these aims and philosophical intuitions, together with an idea that grew up around the Vienna Circle of an ethics in the form of an exact science capable of guiding individuals to make correct decisions. With the help of his boundless mathematical capacity, von Neumann developed a conception of the world as a mathematical game, a world globally governed by a universal logic in which individual consciousness moved following different strategies: his vision guided him from set theory to quantum mechanics, to economics and to his theory of automata (anticipating artificial intelligence and cognitive science). This book provides the first comprehensive scientific and intellectual biography of John von Neumann, a man who perhaps more than any other is representative of twentieth century science. "
Seki was a Japanese mathematician in the seventeenth century known for his outstanding achievements, including the elimination theory of systems of algebraic equations, which preceded the works of Etienne Bezout and Leonhard Euler by 80 years. Seki was a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, although there was apparently no direct interaction between them. The Mathematical Society of Japan andthe History of Mathematics Society of Japan hosted the International Conference on History of Mathematics in Commemoration of the 300th Posthumous Anniversary of Seki in 2008. This book is the official record of the conference and includes supplements of collated texts of Seki's original writings with notes in English on these texts. Hikosaburo Komatsu (Professor emeritus, The University of Tokyo), one of the editors, is known for partial differential equations and hyperfunction theory, and for his study on the history of Japanese mathematics. He served as the President of the International Congress of Mathematicians Kyoto 1990."
This first complete English language edition of "Euclides vindicatus" presents a corrected and revised edition of the classical English translation of Saccheri's text by G.B. Halsted. It is complemented with a historical introduction on the geometrical environment of the time and a detailed commentary that helps to understand the aims and subtleties of the work."" "Euclides vindicatus, " written by the Jesuit mathematician Gerolamo Saccheri, was published in Milan in 1733. In it, Saccheri attempted to reform elementary geometry in two important directions: a demonstration of the famous Parallel Postulate and the theory of proportions. Both topics were of pivotal importance in the mathematics of the time. In particular, the Parallel Postulate had escaped demonstration since the first attempts at it in the Classical Age, and several books on the topic were published in the Early Modern Age. At the same time, the theory of proportion was the most important mathematical tool of the Galilean School in its pursuit of the mathematization of nature. Saccheri's attempt to prove the Parallel Postulate is today considered the most important breakthrough in geometry in the 18th century, as he was able to develop for hundreds of pages and dozens of theorems a system in geometry that denied the truth of the postulate (in the attempt to find a contradiction). This can be regarded as the first system of non-Euclidean geometry. Its later developments by Lambert, Bolyai, Lobachevsky and Gauss eventually opened the way to contemporary geometry.Occupying a unique position in the literature of mathematical history, "Euclid Vindicated from Every Blemish" will be of high interest to historians of mathematics as well as historians of philosophy interested in the development of non-Euclidean geometries.
Learn about the boy who - could read and add numbers when he was three years old, - thwarted his teacher by finding a quick and easy way to sum the numbers 1-100, - attracted the attention of a Duke with his genius, and became the man who... - predicted the reappearance of a lost planet, - discovered basic properties of magnetic forces, - invented a surveying tool used by professionals until the invention of lasers. Based on extensive research of original and secondary sources, this historical narrative will inspire young readers and even curious adults with its touching story of personal achievement.
This volume contains nine essays dealing with historical issues of
mathematics. The topics covered span three different approaches to
the history of mathematics that may be considered both
representative and vital tothe field. The first section, Images of
Mathematics, addresses the historiographical and philosophical
issues involved in determining the meaning of mathematical history.
The second section, Differential Geometry and Analysis, traces the
convoluted development of the ideas of differential geometry and
analysis. The third section, Research Communities and International
Collaboration, discusses the structure and interaction of
mathematical communities through studies of the social fabric of
the mathematical communities of the U.S. and China.
This volume contains thirteen papers that were presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/La Societe Canadienne d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Mathematiques, held on the campus of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. It contains rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on general topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics, as well as on the meeting's special topic, Early Scientific Computation. These papers cover subjects such as *Physical tools used by mathematicians in the seventeenth century *The first historical appearance of the game-theoretical concept of mixed-strategy equilibrium *George Washington's mathematical cyphering books *The development of the Venn diagram *The role of Euler and other mathematicians in the development of algebraic analysis *Arthur Cayley and Alfred Kempe's influence on Charles Peirce's diagrammatic logic *The influence publishers had on the development of mathematical pedagogy in the nineteenth century *A description of the 1924 International Mathematical Congress held in Toronto, told in the form of a "narrated slide show" Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers will be accessible to not only mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also anyone with a general interest in mathematics.
This volume aims to make Stephen of Pisa and Antioch's work on the celestial sciences accessible to a wider readership, providing not just the text but a translation and introduction as well. The edition is based on the only known manuscript of the Liber Mamonis, MS Cambrai, Mediatheque d'Agglomeration, A 930. It is split into two parts: the first provides an extensive introduction to Stephen and his work, while the second features the edition and translation. A comprehensive glossary and collection of photographs of plates are also included.
**The First Ever Maths Book to be a No.1 Bestseller** 'Wonderful ... superb' Daily Mail What makes a bridge wobble when it's not meant to? Billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? A building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. As Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths: computer programmes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths works quietly behind the scenes, until ... it doesn't. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman empire and a hapless Olympic shooting team, Matt Parker shows us the bizarre ways maths trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Mathematics doesn't have good 'people skills', but we would all be better off, he argues, if we saw it as a practical ally. This book shows how, by making maths our friend, we can learn from its pitfalls. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks, jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.
This groundbreaking volume provides an up-to-date, accessible guide to Sanskrit astronomical tables and their analysis. It begins with an overview of Indian mathematical astronomy and its literature, including table texts, in the context of history of pre-modern astronomy. It then discusses the primary mathematical astronomy content of table texts and the attempted taxonomy of this genre before diving into the broad outlines of their representation in the Sanskrit scientific manuscript corpus. Finally, the authors survey the major categories of individual tables compiled in these texts, complete with brief analyses of some of the methods for constructing and using them, and then chronicle the evolution of the table-text genre and the impacts of its changing role on the discipline of Sanskrit jyotisa. There are also three appendices: one inventories all the identified individual works in the genre currently known to the authors; one provides reference information about the details of all the notational, calendric, astronomical, and other classification systems invoked in the study; and one serves as a glossary of the relevant Sanskrit terms.
This book is a complete English translation of Augustin-Louis Cauchy's historic 1823 text (his first devoted to calculus), Resume des lecons sur le calcul infinitesimal, "Summary of Lectures on the Infinitesimal Calculus," originally written to benefit his Ecole Polytechnique students in Paris. Within this single text, Cauchy succinctly lays out and rigorously develops all of the topics one encounters in an introductory study of the calculus, from his classic definition of the limit to his detailed analysis of the convergence properties of infinite series. In between, the reader will find a full treatment of differential and integral calculus, including the main theorems of calculus and detailed methods of differentiating and integrating a wide variety of functions. Real, single variable calculus is the main focus of the text, but Cauchy spends ample time exploring the extension of his rigorous development to include functions of multiple variables as well as complex functions. This translation maintains the same notation and terminology of Cauchy's original work in the hope of delivering as honest and true a Cauchy experience as possible so that the modern reader can experience his work as it may have been like 200 years ago. This book can be used with advantage today by anyone interested in the history of the calculus and analysis. In addition, it will serve as a particularly valuable supplement to a traditional calculus text for those readers who desire a way to create more texture in a conventional calculus class through the introduction of original historical sources.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematician brilliant beyond comparison who inspired many great mathematicians. There is extensive literature available on the work of Ramanujan. But what is missing in the literature is an analysis that would place his mathematics in context and interpret it in terms of modern developments. The 12 lectures by Hardy, delivered in 1936, served this purpose at the time they were given. This book presents Ramanujan's essential mathematical contributions and gives an informal account of some of the major developments that emanated from his work in the 20th and 21st centuries. It contends that his work still has an impact on many different fields of mathematical research. This book examines some of these themes in the landscape of 21st-century mathematics. These essays, based on the lectures given by the authors focus on a subset of Ramanujan's significant papers and show how these papers shaped the course of modern mathematics.
The primary purpose of this textbook is to introduce the reader to a wide variety of elementary permutation statistical methods. Permutation methods are optimal for small data sets and non-random samples, and are free of distributional assumptions. The book follows the conventional structure of most introductory books on statistical methods, and features chapters on central tendency and variability, one-sample tests, two-sample tests, matched-pairs tests, one-way fully-randomized analysis of variance, one-way randomized-blocks analysis of variance, simple regression and correlation, and the analysis of contingency tables. In addition, it introduces and describes a comparatively new permutation-based, chance-corrected measure of effect size. Because permutation tests and measures are distribution-free, do not assume normality, and do not rely on squared deviations among sample values, they are currently being applied in a wide variety of disciplines. This book presents permutation alternatives to existing classical statistics, and is intended as a textbook for undergraduate statistics courses or graduate courses in the natural, social, and physical sciences, while assuming only an elementary grasp of statistics.
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.
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.
From a Geometrical Point of View explores historical and philosophical aspects of category theory, trying therewith to expose its significance in the mathematical landscape. The main thesis is that Klein's Erlangen program in geometry is in fact a particular instance of a general and broad phenomenon revealed by category theory. The volume starts with Eilenberg and Mac Lane's work in the early 1940's and follows the major developments of the theory from this perspective. Particular attention is paid to the philosophical elements involved in this development. The book ends with a presentation of categorical logic, some of its results and its significance in the foundations of mathematics. From a Geometrical Point of View aims to provide its readers with a conceptual perspective on category theory and categorical logic, in order to gain insight into their role and nature in contemporary mathematics. It should be of interest to mathematicians, logicians, philosophers of mathematics and science in general, historians of contemporary mathematics, physicists and computer scientists.
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.
Thabit ibn Qurra (826a "901) was one of historya (TM)s most original thinkers and displayed expertise in the most difficult disciplines of this time: geometry, number theory, and astronomy as well as ontology, physics, and metaphysics. Approximately a dozen of this shorter mathematical and philosophical writings are collected in this volume. Critically edited with accompanying commentary, these writings show how Thabit Ibn Qurra developed and reconceived the intellectual inheritance of ancient Greece in all areas of knowledge.
Leon Battista Alberti was an outstanding polymath of the fifteenth century, alongside Piero della Francesca and before Leonardo da Vinci. While his contributions to architecture and the visual arts are well known and available in good English editions, and much of his literary and social writings are also available in English, his mathematical works are not well represented in readily available, accessible English editions have remained accessible only to specialists. The four treatises included here Ludi matematici, De Componendis Cifris, Elementi di pittura and De lunularum quadratura are extremely valuable in rounding out the portrait of this multitalented thinker. The treatises are presented in modern English translations, with commentary that is intended to make evident the depths of Alberti s knowledge as well as address the treatises mathematical, historical and cultural context, their classical Greek roots, and their relationship to later works by Renaissance thinkers." |
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