The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics

NOTE EDITORE

This Handbook explores the history of mathematics under a series of themes which raise new questions about what mathematics has been and what it has meant to practise it. It addresses questions of who creates mathematics, who uses it, and how. A broader understanding of mathematical practitioners naturally leads to a new appreciation of what counts as a historical source. Material and oral evidence is drawn upon as well as an unusual array of textual sources. Further, the ways in which people have chosen to express themselves are as historically meaningful as the contents of the mathematics they have produced. Mathematics is not a fixed and unchanging entity. New questions, contexts, and applications all influence what counts as productive ways of thinking. Because the history of mathematics should interact constructively with other ways of studying the past, the contributors to this book come from a diverse range of intellectual backgrounds in anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and literature, as well as history of mathematics more traditionally understood. The thirty-six self-contained, multifaceted chapters, each written by a specialist, are arranged under three main headings: 'Geographies and Cultures', 'Peoples and Practices', and 'Interactions and Interpretations'. Together they deal with the mathematics of 5000 years, but without privileging the past three centuries, and an impressive range of periods and places with many points of cross-reference between chapters. The key mathematical cultures of North America, Europe, the Middle East, India, and China are all represented here as well as areas which are not often treated in mainstream history of mathematics, such as Russia, the Balkans, Vietnam, and South America. A vital reference for graduates and researchers in mathematics, historians of science, and general historians.

SOMMARIO

1.1 - What was mathematics in the ancient world? Greek and Chinese perspectives1.2 - Mathematics and authority: a case study in New and Old World accounting1.3 - Heavenly learning, statecraft, and scholarship: the Jesuits and their mathematics in China1.4 - The internationalization of mathematics in a world of nations, 1800-19602.1 - The two cultures of mathematics in ancient Greece2.2 - Tracing mathematical networks in seventeenth-century England2.3 - Mathematics and mathematics education in traditional Vietnam2.4 - A Balkan trilogy: mathematics in the Balkans before the First World War3.1 - Mathematics education in an Old Babylonian scribal school3.2 - The archaeology of mathematics in an ancient Greek city3.3 - Engineering the Neapolitan state3.4 - Observatory mathematics in the nineteenth century4.1 - Patronage of the mathematical sciences in Islamic societies4.2 - John Aubrey and the 'Lives of our English mathematical writers'4.3 - Introducing mathematics, building an empire: Russia under Peter I4.4 - Human computers in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain5.1 - Mixing, building, and feeding: mathematics and technology in ancient Egypt5.2 - Siyaq: numerical notation in the Persianate world5.3 - Learning arithmetic: textbooks and their users in England 1500-19005.4 - Algorithms and automation: mathematics and weaving6.1 - The cognitive and cultural foundations of numbers6.2 - Sanskrit mathematical verse6.3 - Antiquity, nobility, and utility: picturing the Early Modern mathematical sciences6.4 - Writing the ultimate mathematical textbook: Nicolas Bourbaki's Eléments de mathématique7.1 - People and numbers in early imperial China7.2 - Mathematics in fourteenth-century theology7.3 - Mathematics, music, and experiment in late seventeenth-century England7.4 - Modernism in mathematics8.1 - The transmission of the Elements to the Latin West: three case studies8.2 - 'Gigantic implements of war': images of Newton as a mathematician8.3 - From cascades to calculus: Rolle's Theorem8.4 - Abstraction and application: new contexts, new interpretations in twentieth-century mathematics9.1 - Traditions and myths in the historiography of Egyptian mathematics9.2 - Reading ancient Greek mathematics9.3 - Number, shape, and the nature of space: thinking through Islamic art9.4 - The historiography and history of mathematics in the Third Reich

AUTORE

Eleanor Robson is Reader in Ancient Middle Eastern Science in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100-1600 BC (1999), Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (2008), and many articles on the socio-intellectual history of the cuneiform world. She is co-director of an AHRC-funded project on the geography of knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia. Jacqueline Stedall is Senior Research Fellow in History of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford, and Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. Her research focuses on European mathematics from the 16th to the 18th century, with a special interest in the development of algebra. Recent publications include Mathematics Emerging: A Sourcebook, 1540-1900 (2008) and The 'Magisteria magna' of Thomas Harriot (2008, with Janet Beery). She is also editor of the BSHM Bulletin, Journal of the British Society of the History of Mathematics.

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780199603190
• Collana: Oxford Handbooks
• Dimensioni: 242 x 48.7 x 170 mm Ø 1460 gr
• Formato: Brossura
• Illustration Notes: 90 line illustrations, 57 halftones
• Pagine Arabe: 928