19世纪上半叶的无穷级数敛散性判别法

对19世纪上半叶欧洲数学家在正项级数敛散性判别方面的工作作了考察和分析.     

Mathematics in the Memoirs of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences in the 19th century

From the end of the 18th century until the appearance of the first issue of the Jornal de Sciencias Mathematicas e Astronomicas in 1877, the Lisbon Royal Academy of Sciences, founded in 1779, was the main publisher in Portugal of periodicals that included mathematical papers. In this article I will give an overview of the mathematical papers which appeared in the Academy's Memoirs during the 19th century, in the context of the scientific output published in its pages. We will characterize the community of mathematicians around the Academy's journal and the changes in background and in themes researched throughout the century.     

Variables,limits, and infinitesimals in Portugal in the late 18th century

Two of the most important Portuguese mathematicians of the late 18th century, José Anastácio da Cunha and Francisco Garção Stockler, showed interest in the question of the principles of the calculus and wrote on that subject. In spite of both being admirers of Newton and d'Alembert, only Stockler based the calculus on the concept of limit; Cunha used his own definition of infinitesimal. Here, I present the fundamental concepts on which Cunha and Stockler based their versions of the calculus and I argue that the main difference between them lies in different notions of variable.     

BSHM meetings

In a deliberately provocative first part to this paper, I argue that nineteenth-century British mathematicians had an unduly high opinion of themselves and a striking lack of appreciation for contemporary continental developments. I argue that this failure was rooted in the institutions that supported mathematics, and was only remedied towards the end of the century. In the more sober second half of the paper I ask if historians of mathematics have subscribed to this overestimate, and explore some related questions, among them what are historians doing when they write history: telling it as it was, or righting or defending the record? Historians of mathematics also need to consider British priorities for research in the nineteenth century, and a comparison with other minor players (such as Japan, Portugal, or Poland) might be illuminating.     

On the graphic statics for the analysis of masonry domes

The graphic statics applied to constructions has been characterized by a rapid development between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. In this paper the application of the graphic statics to masonry domes is show. In particular three different methods are applied to a specific case study and the results discussed. (© 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Permanence as a principle of practice

The paper discusses Peano's argument for preserving familiar notations. The argument reinforces the principle of permanence, articulated in the early 19th century by Peacock, then adjusted by Hankel and adopted by many others. Typically regarded as a principle of theoretical rationality, permanence was understood by Peano, following Mach, and against Schubert, as a principle of practical rationality. The paper considers how permanence, thus understood, was used in justifying Burali-Forti and Marcolongo's notation for vectorial calculus, and in rejecting Frege's logical notation, and closes by considering Hahn's revival of Peano's argument against Pringsheim's reading of permanence as a logically necessary principle.     

The introduction of logarithms into Spain

During the first half of the 17th century, logarithms were taught by some professors in Spain, but knowledge of this subject remained scanty until the publication of Architectura civil by Juan Caramuel (1678) and especially of Trigonometria española by José Zaragoza (1672). Logarithms were considered only as an aid for computation up to the second half of the 18th century. Only when the infinitesimal calculus became more widely spread in Spanish mathematics, analytical interpretations of logarithms were also taken into account in books such as Elementos de matemáticas by Benito Bails (1776).     

Changing canons of mathematical and physical intelligibility in the later 17th century

Learning to use the new calculus in the late 17th century meant looking at quantities and configurations, and the relationships among them, in fundamentally new ways. In part, as Leibniz argued implicitly in his articles, the new concepts lay along lines established by Viète, Fermat, Descartes, and other “analysts” in their development of algebraic geometry and the theory of equations. But in part too, those concepts drew intuitive support from the new mechanics that they were being used to explicate and that was rapidly becoming the primary area of their application. So it was that the world machine that emerged from the Scientific Revolution could be both mechanically intelligible and mathematically transcendental.     

Algebraic research schools in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century: the cases of Rome,Palermo, and Pisa

The second half of the 19th century witnessed a sudden and sustained revival of Italian mathematical research, especially in the period following the political unification of the country. Up to the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th, Italian professors—in a variety of institutional settings and with a variety of research interests—trained a number of young scholars in algebraic areas, in particular. Giuseppe Battaglini (1826–1892), Francesco Gerbaldi (1858–1934), and Luigi Bianchi (1856–1928) defined three key venues for the promotion of algebraic research in Rome, Palermo, and Pisa, respectively. This paper will consider the notion of “research school” as an analytic tool and will explore the extent to which loci of algebraic studies in Italy from the second half of the 19th century through the opening decades of the 20th century can be considered as mathematical research schools.     

The calculus of the trigonometric functions

The trigonometric functions entered “analysis” when Isaac Newton derived the power series for the sine in his De Analysi of 1669. On the other hand, no textbook until 1748 dealt with the calculus of these functions. That is, in none of the dozen or so calculus texts written in England and the continent during the first half of the 18th century was there a treatment of the derivative and integral of the sine or cosine or any discussion of the periodicity or addition properties of these functions. This contrasts sharply with what occurred in the case of the exponential and logarithmic functions. We attempt here to explain why the trigonometric functions did not enter calculus until about 1739. In that year, however, Leonhard Euler invented this calculus. He was led to this invention by the need for the trigonometric functions as solutions of linear differential equations. In addition, his discovery of a general method for solving linear differential equations with constant coefficients was influenced by his knowledge that these functions must provide part of that solution.     

非标准分析的产生与早期发展

非标准分析是微积分在20世纪的新发展,并且对现代数学的多个分支及层面产生了深刻的影响.通过考察相关资料,研究了非标准分析的产生、非标准分析的早期发展,进而使人们对非标准分析这一工具有所了解.     

Remarks on the relations between the Italian and American schools of algebraic geometry in the first decades of the 20th century

In this paper we give an overview of the interactions between Italian and American algebraic geometers during the first decades of the 20th century. We focus on three mathematicians—Julian L. Coolidge, Solomon Lefschetz, and Oscar Zariski—whose relations with the Italian school were quite intense. More generally, we discuss the importance of this influence in the development of algebraic geometry in the first half of the 20th century.     

On modeling with multiplicative differential equations

This work is aimed to show that various problems from different fields can be modeled more efficiently using multiplicative calculus, in place of Newtonian calculus. Since multiplicative calculus is still in its infancy, some effort is put to explain its basic principles such as exponential arithmetic, multiplicative calculus, and multiplicative differential equations. Examples from finance, actuarial science, economics, and social sciences are presented with solutions using multiplicative calculus concepts. Based on the encouraging results obtained it is recommended that further research into this field be vested to exploit the applicability of multiplicative calculus in different fields as well as the development of multiplicative calculus concepts.     

George Green对早期孤立子数学理论的重要贡献

本文考察George Green 1839年关于孤立波的论文的产生背景、研究方法及影响.Green自身的科学素养、剑桥的氛围以及罗素的报告促成了他的孤立波研究,其基本思想和处理方法被19世纪一些重要的孤立波研究者不同程度继承借鉴,对孤立波理论研究产生了重要影响.     

The history and ideas of Marxism: the relevance for OR

Journal of the Operational Research Society - The paper examines the origins of Marxism in Europe in the second half of the 19th century in the context of the industrial and political revolutions...     

The emergence of open sets,closed sets,and limit points in analysis and topology

General topology has its roots in real and complex analysis, which made important uses of the interrelated concepts of open set, of closed set, and of a limit point of a set. This article examines how those three concepts emerged and evolved during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thanks especially to Weierstrass, Cantor, and Lebesgue. Particular attention is paid to the different forms of the Bolzano–Weierstrass Theorem found in the latter's unpublished lectures. An abortive early, unpublished introduction of open sets by Dedekind is examined, as well as how Peano and Jordan almost introduced that concept. At the same time we study the interplay of those three concepts (together with those of the closure of a set and of the derived set of a set) in the struggle to determine the ultimate foundations on which general topology was built, during the first half of the 20th century.     

Convergence and formal manipulation in the theory of series from 1730 to 1815

In the early calculus mathematicians used convergent series to represent geometrical quantities and solve geometrical problems. However, series were also manipulated formally using procedures that were the infinitary extension of finite procedures. By the 1720s results were being published that could not be reduced to the original conceptions of convergence and geometrical representation. This situation led Euler to develop explicitly a more formal approach which generalized the early theory. Formal analysis, which was predominant during the second half of the 18th century despite criticisms of it by some researchers, contributed to the enlargement of mathematics and even led to a new branch of analysis: the calculus of operations. However, formal methods could not give an adequate treatment of trigonometric series and series that were not the expansions of elementary functions. The need to use trigonometric series and introduce nonelementary functions led Fourier and Gauss to reject the formal concept of series and adopt a different, purely quantitative notion of series.     

Restricted Kalman filter applied to dynamic style analysis of actuarial funds

We use dynamic style analysis to unveil the strategies followed by Brazilian actuarial funds from January 2004 to August 2008 and investigate whether managers’ decisions were compatible with the intention of protecting the investor against the negative effects of inflation. The main goal of this paper is to show that this methodology is suitable for allowing insurance companies to increase their capacity to monitor the behavior of portfolios and to control the amount of risk they assume. The basic steps of the method are to build and/or choose market indexes capable of characterizing the returns of the main securities available and to apply restricted linear state space models estimated with a Kalman filter with exact initialization. The main conclusions of this paper are the following: (1) the use of exact initialization of the Kalman filter promotes numerical stability; (2) there is no need to consider the entire set of market indicators because a subset containing only three indexes spans the relevant space of investment opportunities; and (3) the actuarial funds’ resources were primarily invested in inflation‐indexed bonds, but fund managers also left room to adjust their exposure to other assets not directly related to the objective of providing protection against inflation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Computing devices,mathematics education and mathematics: Sexton’s omnimetre in its time

Material objects can tell us much about mathematical practice. In 1899, Albert Sexton, a Philadelphia mechanical engineer, received the John Scott Medal of the Franklin Institute for his invention of the omnimetre. This inexpensive circular slide rule was one of a host of computing devices that became common in the United States around 1900. It is inscribed “NUMERI MUNDUM REGUNT”. In part because of instruments such as the omnimetre, numbers increasingly ruled the practical world of the late 19th and early 20th century. This changed not only engineering, but mathematics education and mathematical work.