St andrews mathematics history examples

The archive includes detailed biographies of mathematicians and over other pages of essays on specific topics and supporting material, presented in a readily searchable form which engages and informs. It has had great influence on popularising and communicating the essence and importance of mathematics, inspiring a broad audience across the world, as well as being a vast educational resource.

Mactutor history of mathematics archive

The site has sustained an average of two million hits per week over the last six years. It has been the basis for college courses worldwide and numerous student and school projects on mathematics and its history, and it has served as a seminal resource for many popular science, reference, and academic books, TV and radio broadcasts and lectures. The Archive continues to grow, with new material continually being researched and added.

These staff, all researchers in different fields of mathematics, are fascinated by the historical side of their subject and the evolution of mathematics. Some 6 research students have also made major contributions to the Group over the past 10 years.

What is the history of mathematics

Since members of the Group have published over 30 research papers in highly-regarded peer-reviewed History of Mathematics journals, such as the British Society of the History of Mathematics Bulletin and Historia Mathematica, as well as invited historical papers in mathematics journals, obituaries and many other popular articles.

Primary sources for the research include mathematical papers going back many years, contemporary accounts, and archival material from libraries and mathematical societies, for example, minutes of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society from which are reproduced on the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive and recently discovered manuscripts of William Wallace.

Much of the research relates to UK, and in particular Scottish, mathematicians. For example, since , Craik and O'Connor have authored a series of papers including [R1-R3] on William Wallace and his colleagues and contemporaries. These include the first complete English language account of the calculus using the differential notation which is now universally adopted, and which included what was, with hindsight, a very perceptive discussion on the nature of limits.

The role of Wallace and other mathematicians, notably Leslie and Carlyle, in the introduction of modern analysis to Britain is examined in [R2], and some newly discovered manuscripts of Wallace are presented and critically analysed in [R3]. Craik's recent paper [R4] presents substantial research over several years on the mathematics of the little-known Scottish analyst William Spence, one of the earliest British mathematicians to become familiar with continental mathematics at the turn of the 19th century.

On the more applied side, Craik's paper on the origins of water wave theory [R6], which describes the contributions of the many mathematicians that set the scene for Stokes' work, has attracted 53 citations WoS mostly from papers on contemporary fluids research. Papers by research students supervised by Group staff also range across a wide area of history of mathematics.

These are samples from the considerable body of published research by the Group that has fed into the Archive.