The history of mathematics

Jacqueline stedall - Lịch sử toán học

[...]... about mathematics and mathematicians are no exception The rest of this chapter examines some common myths and pitfalls in the history of mathematics; for convenience, I have called them ‘Ivory tower history , ‘Stepping-stone history , and ‘Elite history The rest of the book will then offer some alternative approaches Ivory tower history One of the most remarkable features of Wiles’s story is the fact... denying the value of certain notable breakthroughs (and this book will begin with one of them) there have to be ways of thinking about history in terms of the many who practise mathematics, not just a few This book can do only a little to redress the masculine bias of most depictions of the history of mathematics; it can, however, pay more than lip service to the mathematics of continents other than Europe;... too the complex web of historical interactions behind a single theorem Generally speaking, the further back one goes, the more difficult it is to trace the ground between the stepping stones, not least because much of the evidence has long since been washed away But without the attempt, there is no history, only the series of anecdotes on which much of the popular history of mathematics is still too often... Diophantus, there stretch vast hinterlands of mathematical activity that have been all too little explored in general histories of the subject Part of the purpose of this book is to redress the balance and to reclaim mathematics for the man, woman, and child in the street, to revisit the history of mathematics from some new perspectives Chapter 2 What is mathematics and who is a mathematician? In the previous... some of the deepest mathematics of the 20th century, which was by then known to relate to Fermat’s Last Theorem: the TaniyamaShimura conjecture, made by two Japanese mathematicians in the 1950s, and the KolyvaginFlach method, developed by Victor Kolyvagin (Russian) and Matthias Flach (German) in the 1980s Note again the propensity of mathematicians to write the names of their predecessors into the historical... professional historians now approach their discipline but how the layperson too can think about mathematical history In this way, I hope that this book will help the reader to recognize the richness and diversity of mathematical activity throughout human history; and that it will be a very short introduction not just to some of the mathematics of the past but to the history of mathematics itself as a modern... out by people of relatively low social status, and were of little or no interest to the intellectuals of the academies When mathematical historians speak of ‘Greek mathematics , as they frequently do, they are almost always speaking of the sophisticated written texts that have come down to us from Euclid, Archimedes, Diophantus, and others, not of the common or garden mathematics of the hoi polloi... topic I have been greatly inspired by other authors in the series, so many of whom have risen to a similarly demanding challenge in imaginative and thought-provoking ways It has been my privilege over the last few years to edit both The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics and the BSHM Bulletin, the journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics This has led me into close working... digress briefly to some mathematics, Fermat’s Last Theorem itself The one bit of mathematics that almost everyone recalls from their schooldays is Pythagoras’ Theorem, which states that the square on the longest side of a right-angled triangle, the hypotenuse, is equal to the sum of the squares on the two shorter sides, the ‘legs’ Most people will probably also remember that if the two short sides are... 978-0-19-959968-4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Contents Acknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction 1 Mathematics: myth and history 2 What is mathematics and who is a mathematician? 3 How are mathematical ideas disseminated? 4 Learning mathematics 5 Mathematical livelihoods 6 Getting inside mathematics 7 The evolving historiography of mathematics Further reading Index Acknowledgements In writing this Very Short . Knott HISTORY John H. Arnold THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin THE HISTORY OF LIFE Michael Benton THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS Jacqueline Stedall THE HISTORY. over the last few years to edit both The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics and the BSHM Bulletin, the journal of the British Society for the History