British Journal for the History of Mathematics最新文献

{"title":"David Singmaster (December 1938 to 13 February 2023)","authors":"Colin Wright","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2023.2225798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2225798","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"38 1","pages":"168 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49018160","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}

{"title":"Prizes and awards","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2023.2193113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2193113","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135754741","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}

{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Isobel Falconer","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2023.2184033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2184033","url":null,"abstract":"It is a great honour to succeed Benjamin Wardhaugh as editor of the British Journal for the History of Mathematics. Benjamin was the first editor of the Journal but he followed a series of ‘giants’ in the British Society for the History of Mathematics. In February 1986, during Ivor Grattan-Guinness’ Presidency, Ron Gowing initiated a Society Newsletter, which ‘will circulate on occasion...with items of interest to members. They [were] invited to lend success to this venture by sending to Dr Gowing items that appear[ed] to be relevant’; a template was provided for such submissions which upheld scholarly standards by requiring not only the item but also a reference or source. The twin features of serving the interests of Society members and recording their activities, and of upholding scholarly standards, have been central ever since. The Newsletter developed under Ron Gowing, Robin Wilson, John Fauvel, and June Barrow-Green, first into the Bulletin under Jackie Stedall and then Tony Mann, and then to the Journal under Benjamin. The early Newsletters reveal also other continuities in the Society, some of them concerns that we may think of as recent. Newsletter 28, Spring 1995, is notable for being John Fauvel’s first as editor but containing his outgoing Presidential Address. It reveals that 50 years ago, in 1973 the President, Gerald Whitrow, was considering issues of imperialism and Indian mathematics in his Address ‘Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1832) and Hindu mathematics’. John took ‘equal opportunities’ for the theme of his own address, weighing up the historiographic tensions inherent in ‘the impact of feminism, anti-racism and other socio-political movements on historical scholarship’, but also the tensions of social inclusivity and scholarly standards brought by ‘technological developments which are ensuring that more people have opportunities to travel, to communicate electronically, and indeed to study and research history of mathematics’. A ‘Computer Section’ to ‘share knowledge, experiences and awareness of technological developments which help in the practice of research and in the promulgation of the history of mathematics’ had started the previous year and the Newsletter had grown from 3 to 73 pages and was becoming","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"38 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48423106","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}

{"title":"Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe: Studies in the Production, Collection, and Use of Mathematical Books","authors":"Philippe Bernhard Schmid","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2023.2169567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2169567","url":null,"abstract":"During the early modern period, hundreds of editions of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry were printed. Individual copies of these editions were often read with pen in hand, resulting in a multitude of physical traces in the books, such as marginalia, notes or marks of ownership. Recent scholarship has emphasized the role of annotation and note-taking in the material history of reading. Owen Gingerich and Renée Raphael have shown that mathematical books were no exception to this, as many of the printed works of Copernicus and Galileo survive in annotated copies. This fascinating new volume of essays combines the material history of the book and the history of mathematical reading by asking how mathematical knowledge ‘got off the printed or manuscript page and into the minds and practices of its readers’ (p. 9). Published in the Material Readings in Early Modern Culture series, the study is based on two workshops organized by the Reading Euclid project at the University of Oxford. The volume focuses on mathematical reading in early modern Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, addressing mathematical texts both in print and in manuscript. The material use of mathematical books provides the main focus. Vincenzo De Risi’s chapter looks at readers’ diverse responses to Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, while Robert Goulding presents a close reading of the problem of proportion in Euclid’s textbook through the manuscript writings of Henry Savile (1549–1622). Mathematical textbooks in particular were heavily annotated by students, tutors or professionals. Some copies were customized, as readers introduced a table of contents or an index by hand. In a wide-ranging survey, Benjamin Wardhaugh discusses material evidence of mathematical practices in the ‘sociable space’ of the printed page. He concludes that elementary textbooks at school were ‘used most heavily and aggressively’, with pupils ‘adding, translating, marking, copying, and re-using’ handwritten notes (p. 243). Kevin Tracey focuses on useful mathematical knowledge in John Seller’s Pocket Book (1677), which was employed ‘as a theatre in which to rehearse and perform mathematical practices’ (p. 277). Building on the foundational study of","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"38 1","pages":"55 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42735262","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}

{"title":"BSHM meeting news","authors":"Brigitte Stenhouse","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2023.2180284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2180284","url":null,"abstract":"s from past meetings Christmas Meeting and AGM Saturday 3rd December Online Sepideh Alassi (Basel) Scientific challenges and encryption of discoveries in the 17th century rational mechanics Proposing mathematical questions as contests was already popular among Renaissance and early-modern mathematicians including Huygens and Leibniz. Commonly, a mathematical question was proposed to be solved, and the challenger explicitly invited a few mathematicians to solve the problem in a given period of time. In this talk, I will first present a few interesting mathematical challenges initiated by Jacob Bernoulli in the 17th century and then will continue with a discussion about the communicated solutions that were encrypted as ciphers, the similarities and differences of these ciphers, and the reasons for encrypting solutions. Christopher Hollings (Oxford) Triangulating ancient Egyptian mathematics When the details of ancient Egyptian mathematics were being reassembled in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, scholars were able to draw upon two British Journal for the History of Mathematics, 2023 Vol. 38, No. 1, 58–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2180284 © 2023 British Journal for the History of Mathematics distinct types of information within the surviving sources. In the first instance, the growing understanding of ancient Egyptian languages and scripts made it possible for some basic meaning to be extracted from the texts. Reconstruction of the ancient languages was, however, an on-going process, and so wherever readings were uncertain, it was possible, and necessary, to interpret texts in the light of an understanding of how the mathematical content ought (from a modern point of view) to work. For the most part, these two sources of evidence, the philological and the mathematical, complemented each other. In rare instances, however, they appeared to clash. In this talk, I will examine one such instance, that of Problem 51 of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, concerning the area of a triangle, in which philological and mathematical evidence seemed to point in different directions. Clare Moriarty (Trinity College, Dublin) Byrne and Berkeley: Geometric Philosophy and Mathematically Eccentric Irishmen Oliver Byrne published his ground-breaking and visually remarkable edition of Euclid’s Elements in 1847. The book is extraordinary: its pages are adorned with generous four-colour diagrams, illustrations and grids, and each proposition begins with an engraved decorative initial. Its aesthetic similarity to various stylistic themes of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements has been noted, but less attention has been paid to the pedagogical and theoretical insights that shaped Byrne’s illustrative choices. In this paper, I explain the pedagogical and philosophical insights that motivated Byrne’s unique publication and explore a line of influence in philosophical debates of the previous century. A new connection between Byrne and George Berkeley","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"38 1","pages":"58 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45403539","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}

{"title":"The construction of the integral for the arc length of a curve based on van Heuraet and Fermat’s works","authors":"Jesús Eduardo Hinojos-Ramos, Diana del Carmen Torres-Corrales, Alberto Camacho-Ríos","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2023.2168880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2023.2168880","url":null,"abstract":"We present the research outcomes of a project in Mathematics Education about the design and implementation of an instrument to learn the integral for the arc length of a function by using differential elements as the strategy for its construction. The research was done via a didactic intervention in a regular Integral Calculus course. The instrument was designed based on historical-epistemological analyses of the works of van Heuraet and Fermat. The main result of this research was that students achieve a more robust conceptualization of the integral for the arc length, supported by its construction with differential elements and its geometric foundation.","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"38 1","pages":"41 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47762816","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}

{"title":"The sine anecdote in Kovalevskaya’s memoirs","authors":"Lene Birkeland, R. Nossum, R. Siegmund‐Schultze","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2022.2135298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2022.2135298","url":null,"abstract":"In Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya’s memoirs there is a rather ambiguous story about how she came to understand trigonometric functions on her own as a teenager by reading the chapter on optics in Tyrtov’s elementary physics textbook. Furthermore, she claims that in so doing, she happened to follow ‘the same road that had been taken historically: that is, instead of a sine I used a chord’. We examine Tyrtov’s textbook in search of sources for such inspiration and quote hitherto unknown critical reactions to her autobiographical reflections by Kovalevskaya’s teacher I I Malevich. We conclude that Kovalevskaya’s memoirs may well be marred by personal interests and/or faltering memory. By adding new sources about Kovalevskaya’s early mathematical education and by critiquing some previously published reactions to the sine anecdote, we hope to contribute some nuances to the biographical literature on this world-famous pioneering female professor of mathematics.","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"38 1","pages":"24 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43383611","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}

{"title":"A critical rendition to the development of mathematics education in Nepal: an anticolonial proposal","authors":"B. Lamichhane, Bal Chandra Luitel","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2022.2109832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2022.2109832","url":null,"abstract":"The history of mathematics education in Nepal had not been explored until the end of the twentieth century. After exploration, it was not included in mathematics curricula due to the invasion of western modern mathematics since 1853. It is quite disheartening that the students who graduated from the university remained ignorant about Nepal's mathematics education history. Against this background, the central purpose of this argumentative paper is to explore oppressive forces behind colonial meddling and envisage an alternative anticolonial proposal of the history of mathematics education. By using anticolonial critical lens as a referent, I offer four phases-classical humanists, multi-epistemic, neo-colonial, and critical discourse – by challenging the linear, neutral, and informative ways of reading and writing history. These phases incorporate Nepal's rich socio-cultural, historical, and political landscape, contribute to creating new discourses and perspectives in mathematics education, and thus reconceptualize a history of mathematics education as a means of transformation.","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"38 1","pages":"3 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42735900","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}

{"title":"Alice without quaternions: another look at the mad tea-party","authors":"Anne van Weerden","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2022.2085446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2022.2085446","url":null,"abstract":"Ever since the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (1866), interpretations of its apparent nonsense have been given. In 2009, Melanie Bayley added new interpretations, for instance, that the chapter about the mad tea-party mocked the quaternions of Sir William Rowan Hamilton. In 2017, Francine Abeles argued against Bayley’s quaternion interpretation of the tea-party, and these arguments will be supported and extended by showing that Bayley’s interpretation is based on erroneous assumptions about quaternions. It can be concluded that it is indeed very unlikely that Dodgson had the quaternions in mind when writing the tea-party chapter.","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"37 1","pages":"230 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47727989","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}

{"title":"Instrument for evaluating historical resources in mathematics textbooks","authors":"I. Salas-García, I. Polo-Blanco, M. González-López","doi":"10.1080/26375451.2022.2101799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/26375451.2022.2101799","url":null,"abstract":"The article describes an instrument consisting of 46 indicators organised under 10 dimensions to assess the presence and educational utility of historical resources in secondary education mathematics textbooks. The instrument was constructed on the basis of previous research on the didactic use of the history of mathematics, existing instruments on the analysis of mathematics textbooks, and mathematics teachers’ assessments of the suitability of the indicators. The instrument can be used as a stand-alone tool or integrated into other procedures addressing textbook analysis more broadly. Its application is illustrated with a sample comparison of two secondary level mathematics textbooks. The instrument has proven to be a useful tool for comparing the historical resources in different publishers’ textbooks, for it enables secondary school mathematics teachers to base their choice of resources on an appraisal of the indicators most relevant to classroom teaching.","PeriodicalId":36683,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Mathematics","volume":"37 1","pages":"238 - 257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42277662","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}