‘A man who has infinite capacity for making things go’: Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker (1873–1956)

Among the leading mathematicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was British mathematician and astronomer, Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker. Born in Southport, in the north of England, Whittaker began his career at the University of Cambridge, before moving to Dunsink to become Royal Astronomer of Ireland and Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College, Dublin, and finishing in Scotland as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Whittaker completed original work in a variety of fields, ranging from pure mathematics to mathematical physics and astronomy, as well as publishing on topics in philosophy, history, and theology. Whittaker is also noted as the first person to have opened a mathematical laboratory—with the focus on numerical analysis—in Great Britain. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of Whittaker's life, both as an academic and a person.     

Mathematicians and World War I: The international diplomacy of G. H. Hardy and Gösta Mittag-Leffler as reflected in their personal correspondence

Gösta Mittag-Leffler was the founding editor of the journal Acta Mathematica. In the early 1870's it was meant, in part, to bring the mathematicians of Germany and France together in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and the political neutrality of Sweden made it possible for Mittag-Leffler to realize this goal by publishing articles in German and French, side by side. Even before the end of the First World War, Mittag-Leffler again saw his role as mediator, and began to work for a reconciliation between German and Allied mathematicians through the auspices of his journal. Similarly, G. H. Hardy was particularly concerned about the reluctance of many scientists in England to attempt any sort of rapprochement with the Central European countries and he sought to do all he could to bring English and German mathematicians together after the War. His correspondence with Mittag-Leffler survives in the Archives of the Institut Mittag-Leffler, Djursholm, Sweden, and serves as the basis for this article, which focuses upon the attempts of Mittag-Leffler to reconcile mathematicians after the War, and to renew international cooperation.     

John Wallis and the French: his quarrels with Fermat,Pascal, Dulaurens,and Descartes

John Wallis, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford from 1649 to 1703, engaged in a number of disputes with French mathematicians: with Fermat (in 1657–1658), with Pascal (in 1658–1659), with Dulaurens (in 1667–1668), and against Descartes (in the early 1670s). This paper examines not only the mathematical content of the arguments but also Wallis’s various strategies of response. Wallis’s opinion of French mathematicians became increasingly bitter, but at the same time he was able to use the confrontations to promote his own reputation.     

Shiing-Shen Chern��s Centenary

Shiing-Shen Chern was an editor of our journal Results in Mathematics from 1984 to 2004, the year he passed away at Tianjin. This article honors one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, in particular remembering his studies at Hamburg University during the years 1934?C1936. This period strongly influenced his mathematical work and was decisive for his later career. We survey the situation of the Department of Mathematics there, Chern??s studies, his visits to Germany in later years, his honours and awards from German institutions, and finally exemplarily his influence on the next generations of Chinese mathematicians studying in Germany.     

Olga Taussky,a torchbearer for mathematics and teacher of mathematicians

Olga Taussky-Todd's mathematical and personal life (1906-1995), her achievements and obstacles, her scientific reasoning and teaching all have served as inspiration to many mathematicians. We describe her role in the mathematics world of the previous century as a torchbearer for mathematics and mathematicians, bearing the “torch of scientific truth” that burns inside of mathematics and its applications. Besides her many deep math contributions – too many to elaborate – she excelled at distilling and presenting mathematical concepts and ideas in her work and gave us many visionary papers and math talks. By sharing her mathematical vision freely she has inspired many of us. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Contributions of Lo Yang to Value Distribution Theory

Professor Lo Yang is a world famous mathematician of our country. He made a lot of outstanding achievements in the value distribution theory of function theory, which are highly rated and widely quoted by domestic and foreign scholars. He also did a lot of work to develop Chinese mathematics. It can be said that Professor Yang is one of the mathematicians who made main influences on the mathematical development in modern China. This paper briefly introduces Professor Yang’s life, mainly discusses his academic achievement and influence, and briefly describes his contributions to the Chinese mathematics community.     

A different perspective of the teaching philosophy of RL Moore

Dr RL Moore was undoubtedly one of the finest mathematics teachers ever. He developed a unique teaching method designed to teach his students to think like mathematicians. His method was not designed to convey any particular mathematical knowledge. Instead, it was designed to teach his students to think. Today, his method has been modified to focus on using student participation toward the goal of the conveyance of mathematical knowledge rather than on Dr Moore's goal of teaching students to think. This article proposes that undergraduates would be better served if they took at least one course using Dr Moore's original method and his original goal.     

Henry Parr Hamilton (1794–1880) and analytical geometry at Cambridge

Scots-born Henry Parr Hamilton played a significant role in the revival of mathematical teaching in Cambridge. Following the promotion of the differential calculus by Herschel, Babbage and Peacock, he wrote influential texts on analytical geometry and on conic sections. This work is examined, and his biography is outlined. Later, he abandoned mathematics for religious affairs in the Church of England, becoming dean of Salisbury Cathedral.     

What do mathematicians mean by proof? A comparative-judgement study of students’ and mathematicians’ views

We present a study in which mathematicians and undergraduate students were asked to explain in writing what mathematicians mean by proof. The 175 responses were evaluated using comparative judgement: mathematicians compared pairs of responses and their judgements were used to construct a scaled rank order. We provide evidence establishing the reliability, divergent validity and content validity of this approach to investigating individuals’ written conceptions of mathematical proof. In doing so, we compare the quality of student and mathematician responses and identify which features the judges collectively valued. Substantively, our findings reveal that despite the variety of views in the literature, mathematicians broadly agree on what people should say when asked what mathematicians mean by proof. Methodologically, we provide evidence that comparative judgement could have an important role to play in investigating conceptions of mathematical ideas, and conjecture that similar methods could be productive in evaluating individuals’ more general (mathematical) beliefs.     

Theodore Strong and ante-bellum American mathematics

Theodore Strong was a prolific contributor to the mathematical and scientific journals of ante-bellum America. His work was not remarkable in its originality, but it dealt with mathematics that was quite sophisticated for its time and place. Strong's published work was a significant factor in the dissemination of advanced mathematics to his countrymen, and he played an important role in the education of a few mathematicians who were active in the latter part of the 19th century, most notably George William Hill.     

Confluences of agendas: Emigrant mathematicians in transit in Denmark, 1933–1945

The present paper analyses the confluence of agendas held by Danish mathematicians and German refugees from Nazi oppression as they unfolded and shaped the mathematical milieu in Copenhagen during the 1930s. It does so by outlining the initiatives to aid emigrant intellectuals in Denmark and contextualises the few mathematicians who would be aided. For most of those, Denmark would be only a transit on the route to more permanent immigration, mainly in the US. Thus, their time in Copenhagen would exert only temporary influence over Danish mathematics; but as it will be argued, the impacts of their transit would be more durable both for the emigrants and for the Danish mathematical milieu. It is thus argued that the influx of emigrant mathematicians helped develop the institutional conditions of mathematics in Copenhagen in important ways that simultaneously bolstered the international outlook of Danish mathematicians. These confluences of agendas became particularly important for Danish mathematics after the war, when the networks developed during the 1930s could be drawn upon.     

La preuve en mathématique

Proof and deductive method in mathematics have their origin in the classic model of exposition developed by Euclid in his famous book on Elements. The attitude of mathematicians towards this method has certainly evolved in the past centuries, but the relationship between understanding and acceptability of mathematical statements has not dramatically changed and still constitutes a characterising element of this discipline. This paper is aimed at explaining and discussing some aspects which may be considered at the origin of difficulties related to proof, in particular, it focusses on the tension between two poles, that of production and that of systematisation of mathematical knowledge.     

“Mathematicians Would Say It This Way”: An Investigation of Teachers' Framings of Mathematicians

Although popular media often provides negative images of mathematicians, we contend that mathematics classroom practices can also contribute to students' images of mathematicians. In this study, we examined eight mathematics teachers' framings of mathematicians in their classrooms. Here, we analyze classroom observations to explore some of the characteristics of the teachers' framings of mathematicians in their classrooms. The findings suggest that there may be a relationship between a teachers' mathematics background and his/her references to mathematicians. We also argue that teachers need to be reflective about how they represent mathematicians to their students, and that preservice teachers should explore their beliefs about what mathematicians actually do.     

Methodological conceptualization of mathematical modelling

The experience of the author and colleges, as mathematicians working in interdisciplinary groups, have shown the necessity to make the process of mathematical modelling more precise and to establish its different phases. In this way, the specific role of the mathematician in working teams can be better understood by the other members of the team and his or her specific capabilities can be used more efficiently. The proposed structuration of the mathematical modelling process is resumed in a following diagram, especially when computational schemes are the desired result (see Figure 1).

The discussion tends to delineate a concept of modelling from a standpoint where the difference between mathematics as a language and mathematics as a science, having its own dynamic and semantics, plays a fundamental role.     

Victorian vital and mathematical statistics

Medical practitioners were largely responsible for the development and application of vital statistics in the mid-nineteenth century, whilst mathematicians established the discipline of mathematical statistics at the end of the nineteenth century in Victorian Britain. The ground-breaking work of such vital statisticians as T R Malthus, William Farr, Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale are examined. Charles Darwin's emphasis of individual biological continuous variation, which played a pivotal role in the epistemic transition from vital to mathematical is assessed in the context of the innovative work of these mathematical statisticians: Francis Galton, W F R Weldon, and primarily Karl Pearson with contributions from Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, George Udny Yule and William Sealy Gosset.     

Viribus unitis! shall be our watchword: the first International Congress of Mathematicians,held 9–11 August 1897 in Zurich

Georg Cantor voiced the need for opportunities facilitating international mathematical cooperation as early as in 1888. A decade and efforts by a number of mathematicians later, the first International Congress of Mathematicians marked the beginning of an era where personal relations between mathematicians were considered to be of great importance. Furthermore, it set the standards for future congresses. As well as giving an overview of the pre-history and the organization of the congress, I look at a wider historic context, conjecture on the reasons why it was held in Zurich and why such a great emphasis was placed on the social aspect. This paper is a slightly modified version of the talk given at the BSHM Research in Progress Meeting held 3 March 2012 in Oxford.     

Toward a scientific and personal biography of Tullio Levi-Civita (1873–1941)

Tullio Levi-Civita was one of the most important Italian mathematicians of the first part of the 20th century, contributing significantly to a number of research fields in mathematics and physics. In addition, he was involved in the social and political life of his time and suffered severe political and racial persecution during the period of Fascism. He tried repeatedly and in several cases successfully to help colleagues and students who were victims of anti-Semitism in Italy and Germany. His scientific and private life is well documented in the letters and documents contained in his Archive. The authors' aim is to illustrate the events of his life by means of his large and remarkable correspondence.     

Peirce's place in mathematics

This article compares treatments of the infinite, of continuity and definitions of real numbers produced by the German mathematician Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind in the late 19th century with similar interests developed at virtually the same time by the American mathematician/philosopher C. S. Peirce. Peirce was led, not by the internal concerns of mathematics which had motivated Cantor and Dedekind, but by research he undertook in logic, to investigate orders of infinite sets (multitudes, in his terminology), and to introduce the related concept of infinitesimals. His arguments in support of the mathematical and logical validity of infinitesimals (which were rejected by such eminent mathematicians as Cantor, Peano, and Russell at the turn of the century) are considered. Attention is also given to the connections between Peirce's mathematics, his philosophy, and especially his interest in continuity as it was related to his Pragmatism.     

‘There are great alterations in the geometry of late’. The rise of Isaac Newton’s early Scottish circle†

This paper traces the rise of three Scottish mathematicians – Colin Campbell, John Craig, and David Gregory – to become key figures in the dissemination and promotion of Newton’s mathematical ideas and natural philosophy in the 1680s. Two medical men – Archibald Pitcairne and his former student George Cheyne – both likewise captivated by the Principia, played minor roles in the story of Newton’s mathematics, while at the same time promoting the concept of mathematical medicine derived from his philosophical thought. Drawing on contemporary correspondence and previously unpublished papers, it considers how these men contributed to the scholarly perception of Newton and how, conversely, Newton used his increasing influence in order to encourage their work, most notably obtaining for Gregory the vacant chair in astronomy at Oxford in 1691.     

Probabilistic expectation and rationality in classical probability theory

Throughout the 18th century, the notion of probabilistic expectation was a matter of controversy among mathematicians. Despite its seminal role in the earliest formulations of mathematical probability, such as that of Huygens, expectation did not remain a fixed concept but underwent several striking shifts in definition. This paper argues that the conception of expectation was altered by mathematicians in a deliberate effort to capture the salient aspects of rational decision making. As the notion of rationality successively took on legal, economic, and then psychological overtones, the definition of probabilistic expectation followed suit.