![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Science & Mathematics > Mathematics > History of mathematics
This publication was made possible through a bequest from my beloved late ~ wife. United together in this present collection are those works by the author which have not previously appeared in book form. The following are excepted: Vorlesungen tiber Differential und Integra1rechnung (Lectures on Differential and Integral Calculus) Vo1s 1-3, Birkhiiuser Verlag, Basel (1965-1968); Aufgabensamm1ung zur Infinitesima1rechnung (Exercises in Infinitesimal Calculus) Vo1s 1, 2a, 2b, and 3, Birkhiiuser Verlag, Basel (1967-1977); two issues from Memorial des Sciences on Conformal Mapping (written together with C. Gattegno), Gauthier-Villars, Paris (1949); Solution of Equations in Euclidean and Banach Spaces, Academic Press, New York (1973); and Stu- dien tiber den Schottkyschen Satz (Studies on Schottky's Theorem), Wepf & Co., Basel (1931). Where corrections have had to be implemented in the text of certain papers, references to these are made at the conclusion of each paper. In the few instances where this system does not, for technical reasons, seem appropriate, an asterisk in the page margin indicates wherever a correction is necessary and is then given at the end of the paper. (There is one exception: the correc- this tions to the paper on page 561 are presented on page 722. The works are published in 6 volumes and are arranged under 16 topic headings. Within each heading, the papers are ordered chronologically according to the date of original publication.
The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite. . . - David Hilbert (1862-1943) Infinity is a fathomless gulf, There is a story attributed to David Hilbert, the preeminent mathe into which all things matician whose quotation appears above. A man walked into a vanish. hotel late one night and asked for a room. "Sorry, we don't have o Marcus Aurelius (121- 180), Roman Emperor any more vacancies," replied the owner, "but let's see, perhaps and philosopher I can find you a room after alL" Leaving his desk, the owner reluctantly awakened his guests and asked them to change their rooms: the occupant of room #1 would move to room #2, the occupant of room #2 would move to room #3, and so on until each occupant had moved one room over. To the utter astonish ment of our latecomer, room #1 suddenly became vacated, and he happily moved in and settled down for the night. But a numbing thought kept him from sleep: How could it be that by merely moving the occupants from one room to another, the first room had become vacated? (Remember, all of the rooms were occupied when he arrived.
Motivated by the importance of the Campbell, Baker, Hausdorff, Dynkin Theorem in many different branches of Mathematics and Physics (Lie group-Lie algebra theory, linear PDEs, Quantum and Statistical Mechanics, Numerical Analysis, Theoretical Physics, Control Theory, sub-Riemannian Geometry), this monograph is intended to: fully enable readers (graduates or specialists, mathematicians, physicists or applied scientists, acquainted with Algebra or not) to understand and apply the statements and numerous corollaries of the main result, provide a wide spectrum of proofs from the modern literature, comparing different techniques and furnishing a unifying point of view and notation, provide a thorough historical background of the results, together with unknown facts about the effective early contributions by Schur, Poincare, Pascal, Campbell, Baker, Hausdorff and Dynkin, give an outlook on the applications, especially in Differential Geometry (Lie group theory) and Analysis (PDEs of subelliptic type) andquickly enable the reader, through a description of the state-of-art and open problems, to understand the modern literature concerning a theorem which, though having its roots in the beginning of the20th century, has not ceased to provide new problems and applications. The book assumes some undergraduate-level knowledge of algebra and analysis, but apart from that is self-contained. Part II of the monograph is devoted to the proofs of the algebraic background. The monograph may therefore provide a tool for beginners in Algebra."
This volume makes an important contribution toward a nuanced appreciation of the Jesuits' interaction with "modernity," and a greater recognition of their contribution to the mathematization of natural philosophy and experimental science. The six essays provide a cross-section of the complex Jesuit encounter with the mathematical sciences during the 17th century.
The pioneering work of French mathematician Pierre de Fermat has attracted the attention of mathematicians for over 350 years. This book was written in honor of the 400th anniversary of his birth, providing readers with an overview of the many properties of Fermat numbers and demonstrating their applications in areas such as number theory, probability theory, geometry, and signal processing. This book introduces a general mathematical audience to basic mathematical ideas and algebraic methods connected with the Fermat numbers.
A great difficulty facing a biographer of Cauchy is that of delineating the curious interplay between the man, his times, and his scientific endeavors. Professor Belhoste has succeeded admirably in meeting this challenge and has thus written a vivid biography that is both readable and informative. His subject stands out as one of the most brilliant, versatile, and prolific fig ures in the annals of science. Nearly two hundred years have now passed since the young Cauchy set about his task of clarifying mathematics, extending it, applying it wherever possible, and placing it on a firm theoretical footing. Through Belhoste's work we are afforded a detailed, rather personalized picture of how a first rate mathematician worked at his discipline - his strivings, his inspirations, his triumphs, his failures, and above all, his conflicts and his errors.
This revised and greatly expanded edition of the Russian classic contains a wealth of new information about the lives of many great mathematicians and scientists, past and present. Written by a distinguished mathematician and featuring a unique mix of mathematics, physics, and history, this text combines original source material and provides careful explanations for some of the most significant discoveries in mathematics and physics. What emerges are intriguing, multifaceted biographies that will interest readers at all levels.
The middle years of the nineteenth century saw two crucial develop ments in the history of modern logic: George Boole's algebraic treat ment of logic and Augustus De Morgan's formulation of the logic of relations. The former episode has been studied extensively; the latter, hardly at all. This is a pity, for the most central feature of modern logic may well be its ability to handle relational inferences. De Morgan was the first person to work out an extensive logic of relations, and the purpose of this book is to study this attempt in detail. Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) was a British mathematician and logician who was Professor of Mathematics at the University of London (now, University College) from 1828 to 1866. A prolific but not highly original mathematician, De Morgan devoted much of his energies to the rather different field of logic. In his Formal Logic (1847) and a series of papers "On the Syllogism" (1846-1862), he attempted with great ingenuity to reformulate and extend the tradi tional syllogism and to systematize modes of reasoning that lie outside its boundaries. Chief among these is the logic of relations. De Mor gan's interest in relations culminated in his important memoir, "On the Syllogism: IV and on the Logic of Relations," read in 1860."
For textual studies relating to the ancient mathematical corpus the efforts by the Danish philologist, 1. L. Heiberg (1854-1928), are especially significant. Beginning with his doctoral dissertation, Quaestiones Archimedeae (Copen hagen, 1879), Heiberg produced an astonishing series of editions and critical studies that remain the foundation of scholarship on Greek mathematical 4 science. For comprehensiveness and accuracy, his editions are exemplary. In his textual studies, as also in the prolegomena to his editions, he carefully described the extant evidence, organized the manuscripts into stemmata, and drew out the implications for the state of the text. 5 With regard to his Archimedean work, Heiberg sometimes betrayed signs of the philologist's occupational disease - the tendency to rewrite a text deemed on subjective grounds to be unworthy. 6 But he did so less often than his prominent 7 contemporaries, and not as to detract appreciably from the value of his editions. In examining textual questions bearing on the Archimedean corpus, he attempted to exploit as much as possible evidence from the ancient commentators, and in some instances from the medieval translations. It is here that opportunities abound for new work, extending, and in some instances superseding, Heiberg's findings. For at his time the availability of the medieval materials was limited. In recent years Marshall Clagett has completed a mammoth critical edition of the medieval Latin tradition of Archimedes,8 while the bibliographical instruments for the Arabic tradition are in good order thanks to the work of Fuat Sezgin."
Kurt Godel, together with Bertrand Russell, is the most important name in logic, and in the foundations and philosophy of mathematics of this century. However, unlike Russel, Godel the mathematician published very little apart from his well-known writings in logic, metamathematics and set theory. Fortunately, Godel the philosopher, who devoted more years of his life to philosophy than to technical investigation, wrote hundreds of pages on the philosophy of mathematics, as well as on other fields of philosophy. It was only possible to learn more about his philosophical works after the opening of his literary estate at Princeton a decade ago. The goal of this book is to make available to the scholarly public solid reconstructions and editions of two of the most important essays which Godel wrote on the philosophy of mathematics. The book is divided into two parts. The first provides the reader with an incisive historico-philosophical introduction to Godel's technical results and philosophical ideas. Written by the Editor, this introductory apparatus is not only devoted to the manuscripts themselves but also to the philosophical context in which they were written. The second contains two of Godel's most important and fascinating unpublished essays: 1) the Gibbs Lecture ("Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their philosophical implications," 1951); and 2) two of the six versions of the essay which Godel wrote for the Carnap volume of the Schilpp series The Library of Living Philosophers ("Is mathematics syntax of language?," 1953-1959)."
A number of years ago, Harriet Sheridan, then Dean of Brown University, organized a series oflectures in which individual faculty members described how it came about that they entered their various fields. I was invited to participate in this series and found in the invitation an opportunity to recall events going back to my early teens. The lecture was well received and its reception encouraged me to work up an expanded version. My manuscript lay dormant all these years. In the meanwhile, sufficiently many other mathematical experiences and encounters accumulated to make this little book. My 1981 lecture is the basis of the first piece: "Napoleon's Theorem. " Although there is a connection between the first piece and the second, the four pieces here are essentially independent. The sec ond piece, "Carpenter and the Napoleon Ascription," has as its object a full description of a certain type of scholar-storyteller (of whom I have known and admired several). It is a pastiche, contain ing a salad bar selection blended together by my own imagination. This piece purports, as a secondary goal, to present a solution to a certain unsolved historical problem raised in the first piece. The third piece, "The Man Who Began His Lectures with 'Namely'," is a short reminiscence of Stefan Bergman, one of my teachers of graduate mathematics. Bergman, a remarkable person ality, was born in Poland and came to the United States in 1939."
Entre Meeanique et Arehiteeture: e'est-a-dire, entre les proeedes teehniques qui, depuis des temps immemoriaux eonforment l'art et la scienee de la eonstruetion au developpement de la scienee physique et mathematique la plus generale et, peut-etre, la plus abstraite, subalternata tanturn geometriae et philosophiae naturalis, eomme le disait Tartaglia, bien que liee aux faits les plus farniliers: la statique et la meeanique des mareriaux et des struetures. Le theme qui nous eoneeme est done la relation entre la technique et la scienee dans son exemple le plus important, je crois, du point de vue historiographique mais aussi epistemologique: a savoir, la relation entre le savoir faire, qui se eonforme a la norme, en respeetant une determination et une eongruenee parfaites avee son objectif, et la theorie, qui eonfirme la norme et temoigne la neeessite de la determiner eongrfiment avec les lois de la nature. Avee une extreme perspieaeite, quelque peu offusquee par une frivolite erudite, l' Abbe Franeeseo Maria Franeesehinis, mathematieien et adepte de la philosophie des lurnieres, se peneha sur la question dans un bref traite qu'il publia a Padoue en 1808 sous 1 le titre Des Mathematiques appliquees , soutenant la nouvelle tendanee didaetique introduite a l'Universite de Padoue par l'ephemere Regne d'Italie. Simulant un eonflit entre plusieurs auteurs, Franeesehinis exposait une premiere these dans un Discours inaugural qu'il reeita peut-etre reellement en 1807, lorsqu'il devint titulaire de la Chaire de Mathematiques appliquees.
When, after the agreeable fatigues of solicitation, Mrs Millamant set out a long bill of conditions subject to which she might by degrees dwindle into a wife, Mirabell offered in return the condition that he might not thereby be beyond measure enlarged into a husband. With age and experience in research come the twin dangers of dwindling into a philosopher of science while being enlarged into a dotard. The philosophy of science, I believe, should not be the preserve of senile scientists and of teachers of philosophy who have themselves never so much as understood the contents of a textbook of theoretical physics, let alone done a bit of mathematical research or even enjoyed the confidence of a creating scientist. On the latter count I run no risk: Any reader will see that I am untrained (though not altogether unread) in classroom philosophy. Of no ignorance of mine do I boast, indeed I regret it, but neither do I find this one ignorance fatal here, for few indeed of the great philosophers to explicate whose works hodiernal professors of phil osophy destroy forests of pulp were themselves so broadly and specially trained as are their scholiasts. In attempt to palliate the former count I have chosen to collect works written over the past thirty years, some of them not published before, and I include only a few very recent essays."
The geometric calculus, in general, consists in a system of operations on geometric entities, and their consequences, analogous to those that algebra has on the num bers. It permits the expression in formulas of the results of geometric constructions, the representation with equations of propositions of geometry, and the substitution of a transformation of equations for a verbal argument. The geometric calculus exhibits analogies with analytic geometry; but it differs from it in that, whereas in analytic geometry the calculations are made on the numbers that determine the geometric entities, in this new science the calculations are made on the geometric entities themselves. A first attempt at a geometric calculus was due to the great mind of Leibniz (1679);1 in the present century there were proposed and developed various methods of calculation having practical utility, among which deserving special mention are 2 the barycentric calculus of Mobius (1827), that of the equipollences of Bellavitis (1832),3 the quaternions of Hamilton (1853),4 and the applications to geometry 5 of the Ausdehnungslehre of Hermann Grassmann (1844). Of these various methods, the last cited to a great extent incorporates the others and is superior in its powers of calculation and in the simplicity of its formulas. But the excessively lofty and abstruse contents of the Ausdehnungslehre impeded the diffusion of that science; and thus even its applications to geometry are still very little appreciated by mathematicians."
Ernst Specker has made decisive contributions towards shaping direc tions in topology, algebra, mathematical logic, combinatorics and algorith mic over the last 40 years. We have derived great pleasure from marking his seventieth birthday by editing the majority of his scientific publications, and thus making his work available in a unified form to the mathematical community. In order to convey an idea of the richness of his personality, we have also included one of his sermons. Of course, the publication of these Selecta can pay tribute only to the writings of Ernst Specker. It cannot adequately express his originality and wisdom as a person nor the fascination he exercises over his students, colleagues and friends. We can do no better than to quote from Hao Wang in the 'Festschrift' Logic and Algorithmic I: Specker was ill for an extended period before completing his formal education. He had the leisure to think over many things. This experi ence may have helped cultivating his superiority as a person. In terms of traditional Chinese categories, I would say there is a taoist trait in him in the sense of being more detached, less competitive, and more under standing. I believe he has a better sense of what is important in life and arranges his life better than most logicians. We are grateful to Birkhauser Verlag for the production of this Selecta volume. Our special thanks go to Jonas Meon for sharing with us his intimate knowledge of his friend Ernst Specker."
In Western Civilization Mathematics and Music have a long and interesting history in common, with several interactions, traditionally associated with the name of Pythagoras but also with a significant number of other mathematicians, like Leibniz, for instance. Mathematical models can be found for almost all levels of musical activities from composition to sound production by traditional instruments or by digital means. Modern music theory has been incorporating more and more mathematical content during the last decades. This book offers a journey into recent work relating music and mathematics. It contains a large variety of articles, covering the historical aspects, the influence of logic and mathematical thought in composition, perception and understanding of music and the computational aspects of musical sound processing. The authors illustrate the rich and deep interactions that exist between Mathematics and Music.
The purpose of presenting this book to the scholarly world is twofold. In the first place, I wish to provide for the English reader a translation of the earliest extant Arabic work of Hindi arithmetic. It shows this system at its earliest stages and the first steps in its development, a subject not yet well known except for readers of some Arabic publications by the present writer. This book is therefore of particular importance for students of the history of mathematical techniques. The medieval author, AI-UqHdisI, was, it seems, not noticed by bibliographers; neither was his work, which lay hardly noticed by modern scholars until 1960 when I happened to see a microfilm copy of it in the Institute of Arabic Manu scripts in Cairo. A steady labour immediately followed to make a comparative study of the text together with over twenty other texts, some of them not yet known to scholars. This pursuit resulted in (i) a doctoral degree awarded to me in 1966 by the University of Khartoum, (ii) the publication of several texts in Arabic including the text here translated, and (iii) the publication of several articles in Arabic and English on the history of arithmetic in the Middle Ages. The second purpose of this book is to make the main results of my study available to the English reader."
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."
The question of when and how the basic concepts that characterize modern science arose in Western Europe has long been central to the history of science. This book examines the transition from Renaissance engineering and philosophy of nature to classical mechanics oriented on the central concept of velocity. For this new edition, the authors include a new discussion of the doctrine of proportions, an analysis of the role of traditional statics in the construction of Descartes' impact rules, and go deeper into the debate between Descartes and Hobbes on the explanation of refraction. They also provide significant new material on the early development of Galileo's work on mechanics and the law of fall.
The letters in this volume cover Poincare's multifaceted career in astronomy in its entirety, extending from the time of his first publications in 1880 to the end of his life in 1912. At a tender age, Poincare established his authority in questions of celestial mechanics, and his views were soon sought after on a vast array of questions by the leading astronomers and geodesists of his time, including C.V.L. Charlier, G.H. Darwin, H. Faye, F.R. Helmert, G. W. Hill, A. Lindstedt, A.M. Liapunov, N. Lockyer, S. Newcomb, K. Schwarzschild, and F. Tisserand. Poincare and his correspondents take up topics ranging from the three-body problem and perturbation theory to the determination of the geoide and the equilibrium figures of rotating fluid masses. The volume also sheds light on Poincare's three terms as president of the Bureau of Longitudes, where he guided French astronomy and geodesy through ambitious projects, such as the measurement of an arc of meridian near Quito. ------ Les lettres du troisieme volume de la Correspondance de Poincare scandent toute son oeuvre astronomique, allant de ses premiers memoires sur les courbes definies par une equation differentielle (1881), jusqu'aux analyses des hypotheses cosmogoniques (1911). Encore tres jeune, Poincare s'est fait remarquer pour sa maitrise des questions de la mecanique celeste, de tel sorte que les astronomes et les geodesiens l'ont souvent interpelle, y compris O. Callandreau, C.V.L. Charlier, G.H. Darwin, F.R. Helmert, A. Lindstedt, A.M. Lyapunov, Simon Newcomb, Karl Schwarzschild et F. Tisserand. Avec ses correspondants, Poincare abordaient les questions principales de l'astronomie mathematique, du celebre probleme des trois corps a la theorie des perturbations et aux figures d'equilibre des masses fluides en rotation. La correspondance de Poincare editee et annotee dans ce volume concerne, au-dela des memoires mathematiques, l'activite de Poincare en tant que Professeur d'astronomie mathematique et de mecanique celeste a la Sorbonne, redacteur en chef duBulletin astronomique, et membre du Bureau des longitudes, que Poincare a preside a trois reprises. Sa correspondance illumine, dans ce dernier cadre, la realisation de la mesure d'un arc de meridien a Quito, et le reglement d'un differend franco-brittanique a propos de la difference de longitude entre Greenwich et Paris.
The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) is
currently implementing the greatest change ever in the world's
system of weights and measures -- it is redefining the kilogram,
the final artefact standard, and reorganizing the system of
international units. This book tells the inside story of what led
to these changes, from the events surrounding the founding of the
BIPM in 1875 -- a landmark in the history of international
cooperation -- to the present. It traces not only the evolution of
the science, but also the story of the key individuals and events.
Such Silver Currents is the first biography of a mathematical genius and his literary wife, their wide circle of well-known intellectual and artistic friends, and through them of the age in which they lived. William Clifford is now recognised not only for his innovative and lasting mathematics, but also for his philosophy, which embraced the fundamentals of scientific thought, the nature of the physical universe, Darwinian theory, the nature of consciousness, personal morality and law, and the whole mystery of being. Clifford algebra is seen as the basis for Dirac's theory of the electron, fundamental to modern physics, and Clifford also anticipated Einstein's idea that space is curved. The book includes a personal reflection on William Clifford's mathematics by the Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose O.M. The year after his election to the Royal Society, Clifford married Lucy Lane, the journalist and novelist. During their four years of marriage they held Sunday salons attended by many well-known scientific, literary and artistic personalities. Following William's early death, Lucy became a close friend and confidante of Henry James. Her wide circle of friends included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Thomas Huxley, Sir Frederick Macmillan and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
This account of the History of General Topology has grown out of the special session on this topic at the American Mathematical Society meeting in San Anto- nio, Texas, 1993. It was there that the idea grew to publish a book on the historical development of General Topology. Moreover it was felt that it was important to undertake this project while topologists who knew some of the early researchers were still active. Since the first paper by Frechet, "Generalisation d'un theoreme de Weier- strass", C.R.Acad. Sci. 139, 1904, 848-849, and Hausdorff's classic book, "GrundZiige der Mengenlehre", Leipzig, 1914, there have been numerous devel- opments in a multitude of directions and there have been many interactions with a great number of other mathematical fields. We have tried to cover as many of these as possible. Most contributions concern either individual topologists, specific schools, specific periods, specific topics or a combination of these.
This fifth volume of A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics is complemented by four preceding volumes which focused on the main chapters of classical mathematics: infinitesimal geometry, theory of conics and its applications, spherical geometry, mathematical astronomy, etc. This book includes seven main works of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) and of two of his predecessors, Thabit ibn Qurra and al-Sijzi: The circle, its transformations and its properties; Analysis and synthesis: the founding of analytical art; A new mathematical discipline: the Knowns; The geometrisation of place; Analysis and synthesis: examples of the geometry of triangles; Axiomatic method and invention: Thabit ibn Qurra; The idea of an Ars Inveniendi: al-Sijzi. Including extensive commentary from one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, this fundamental text is essential reading for historians and mathematicians at the most advanced levels of research. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Cyclomathesis - or, An Easy Introduction…
William 1701-1782 Emerson
Hardcover
R1,072
Discovery Miles 10 720
Mathematical Communities in the…
Laurent Mazliak, Rossana Tazzioli
Hardcover
R3,740
Discovery Miles 37 400
|