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.     

How algebra spoiled recreational problems: A case study in the cross-cultural dissemination of mathematics

This paper deals with a sub-class of recreational problems which are solved by a simple memorized rule resulting from an elementary arithmetical or algebraic solution, called proto-algebraic rules. Their recreational aspect is derived from a surprise or trick solution which is not immediately obvious to the subjects involved. Around 1560 many such problems wane from arithmetic and algebra textbooks to reappear in the eighteenth century. Several hypotheses are investigated why popular Renaissance recreational problems lost their appeal. We arrive at the conclusion that the emergence of algebra as a general problem solving method changed the scope of what is considered recreational in mathematics.     

W.W. Rouse Ball and the mathematics of string figures

This article examines a chapter of the popular book Mathematical Recreations and Essays (5th to 9th editions) written by the Cambridge mathematician Walter William Rouse Ball (1850–1925). This chapter is devoted to “String Figures”, a procedural activity which consists in producing geometrical forms with a loop of string and which is carried out in many traditional societies throughout the world. By analyzing the way in which Ball selected some string figures within ethnographical publications and conceived the structure of this chapter, it appears that he implicitly brought to light the mathematical dimension of this practice.     

Straddling centuries: The struggles of a mathematician and his university to enter the ranks of research mathematics, 1870–1950

This paper weaves two interlocking histories together. One strand of the fabric traces the development of the American mathematician Joseph B. Reynolds from a peripheral player to an active contributor to mathematics, astronomy, and engineering and to the founding of a sectional association of mathematicians. The other piece describes the evolution of his institution, Lehigh University, from its founding in 1865 to a full-fledged research department that began producing doctorates in 1939. Both Reynolds and Lehigh straddled the line between the pre- and post-Chicago eras in American mathematics.     

German mathematicians in exile in Turkey: Richard von Mises,William Prager,Hilda Geiringer,and their impact on Turkish mathematics

There is a sizable and growing literature on scholars who fled from the Nazi regime, a literature which often focuses on the periods before leaving Germany and after settling permanently in the USA, but relatively less work on the interim period in which many of them found temporary homes in countries such as Turkey. In this article we would like to discuss the scholarly work, activities and the impact of mathematicians Richard von Mises, William Prager and Hilda Geiringer during their stay in Turkey. We argue that the establishment and the development of applied mathematics and mechanics in Turkey owe much to them.     

A characterization of the finite simple group L<Subscript>16</Subscript>(2) by its prime graph

In this paper as the main result we prove that the projective special linear group L ₁₆(2) is uniquely determined by its prime graph. In fact we give a positive answer to an open problem arose in Zavarnitsin (Algebra Logic 43(4), 220–231, 2006) and we obtain a first example of a finite group with connected prime graph which is uniquely determined by its prime graph. This research was in part supported by a grant from IPM (No. 86200023).     

Calculations of faith: mathematics, philosophy, and sanctity in 18th-century Italy (new work on Maria Gaetana Agnesi)

The recent publication of three books on Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) offers an opportunity to reflect on how we have understood and misunderstood her legacy to the history of mathematics, as the author of an important vernacular textbook, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventú italiana (Milan, 1748), and one of the best-known women natural philosophers and mathematicians of her generation. This article discusses the work of Antonella Cupillari, Franco Minonzio, and Massimo Mazzotti in relation to earlier studies of Agnesi and reflects on the current state of this subject in light of the author’s own research on Agnesi.     

Non-Classical Stems from Classical: N. A. Vasiliev’s Approach to Logic and his Reassessment of the Square of Opposition

In the XIXth century there was a persistent opposition to Aristotelian logic. Nicolai A. Vasiliev (1880–1940) noted this opposition and stressed that the way for the novel – non-Aristotelian – logic was already paved. He made an attempt to construct non-Aristotelian logic (1910) within, so to speak, the form (but not in the spirit) of the Aristotelian paradigm (mode of reasoning). What reasons forced him to reassess the status of particular propositions and to replace the square of opposition by the triangle of opposition? What arguments did Vasiliev use for the introduction of new classes of propositions and statement of existence of various levels in logic? What was the meaning and role of the “method of Lobachevsky” which was implemented in construction of imaginary logic? Why did psychologism in the case of Vasiliev happen to be an important factor in the composition of the new ‘imaginary’ logic, as he called it?      

Commentary on Robert Riley’s article “A personal account of the discovery of hyperbolic structures on some knot complements”

We give some background and biographical commentary on the posthumous article  [4] that appears in this journal issue by Robert Riley on his part of the early history of hyperbolic structures on some compact 3-manifolds. A complete list of Riley’s publications appears at the end of this article.     

Cohen-Macaulay, shellable and unmixed clutters with a perfect matching of König type

Let C be a clutter with a perfect matching e₁,…,e_g of König type and let Δ_C be the Stanley-Reisner complex of the edge ideal of C. If all c-minors of C have a free vertex and C is unmixed, we show that Δ_C is pure shellable. We are able to describe, in combinatorial and algebraic terms, when Δ_C is pure. If C has no cycles of length 3 or 4, then it is shown that Δ_C is pure if and only if Δ_C is pure shellable (in this case e_i has a free vertex for all i), and that Δ_C is pure if and only if for any two edges f₁,f₂ of C and for any e_i, one has that f₁∩e_i⊂f₂∩e_i or f₂∩e_i⊂f₁∩e_i. It is also shown that this ordering condition implies that Δ_C is pure shellable, without any assumption on the cycles of C. Then we prove that complete admissible uniform clutters and their Alexander duals are unmixed. In addition, the edge ideals of complete admissible uniform clutters are facet ideals of shellable simplicial complexes, they are Cohen-Macaulay, and they have linear resolutions. Furthermore if C is admissible and complete, then C is unmixed. We characterize certain conditions that occur in a Cohen-Macaulay criterion for bipartite graphs of Herzog and Hibi, and extend some results of Faridi-on the structure of unmixed simplicial trees-to clutters with the König property without 3-cycles or 4-cycles.     

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.     

A proximal-like method for a class of second order measure-differential inclusions describing vibro-impact problems

We are interested in the study of discrete mechanical systems subjected to frictionless unilateral constraints. The dynamics is described by a second order measure-differential inclusion for the unknown positions, completed by a Newton's impact law describing the transmission of the velocities when the constraints are saturated.By using another formulation of the problem at the velocity level, we introduce a time-stepping algorithm, inspired by the proximal methods for differential inclusions, and we prove the convergence of the approximate solutions to a solution of the Cauchy problem.     

Henriksen and Isbell on f-rings

This paper gives an account of the contributions of Melvin Henriksen and John Isbell to the abstract theory of f-rings and formally real f-rings, with particular attention to the manner in which their work was framed by universal algebra. I describe the origins of the Pierce-Birkhoff Conjecture and present some other unsolved problems suggested by their work.     

Holomorphic spectral geometry of magnetic Schrödinger operators on Riemann surfaces

We study magnetic Schrödinger operators on line bundles over Riemann surfaces endowed with metrics of constant curvature. We show that for harmonic magnetic fields the spectral geometry of these operators is completely determined by the Bochner Laplacians of the line bundles. Therefore we are led to examine the spectral problem for the Bochner Laplacian ∇^∗∇ of a Hermitian line bundle L with connection ∇ over a Riemann surface S. This spectral problem is analyzed in terms of the natural holomorphic structure on L defined by the Cauchy-Riemann operator associated with ∇. By means of an elliptic chain of line bundles obtained by twisting L with the powers of the canonical bundle we prove that there exists a certain subset of the spectrum σhol(∇^∗∇) such that the eigensections associated with λ∈σhol(∇^∗∇) are given by the holomorphic sections of a certain line bundle of the elliptic chain. For genus p=0,1 we prove that σhol(∇^∗∇) is the whole spectrum, whereas for genus p>1 we get a finite number of eigenvalues.     

E.W. Chittenden and the early history of general topology

E.W. Chittenden's work and its influence on the early history of general topology are examined. Particular attention is given to his work in metrization theory and its role in the background of the Aleksandrov-Uryson Metrization Theorem. A recounting of Professor Chittenden's career, a list of his students and his publications and a chronology in the early history of General Topology are also included.     

Remembering Mel Henriksen and (some of) his theorems

The author selects theorems from three papers co-authored by Mel Henriksen, proves some of those, and offers some consequences and commentary. Also included are some comments, mathematical and social, on Mel Henriksen as a colleague, a co-author, and a forceful presence in the wider political and mathematical community.     

An “almost” full embedding of the category of graphs into the category of groups

We construct a functor F:Graphs→Groups which is faithful and “almost” full, in the sense that every nontrivial group homomorphism FX→FY is a composition of an inner automorphism of FY and a homomorphism of the form Ff, for a unique map of graphs f:X→Y. When F is composed with the Eilenberg-Mac Lane space construction K(FX,1) we obtain an embedding of the category of graphs into the unpointed homotopy category which is full up to null-homotopic maps.We provide several applications of this construction to localizations (i.e. idempotent functors); we show that the questions:

(1)

Is every orthogonality class reflective?

(2)

Is every orthogonality class a small-orthogonality class?

have the same answers in the category of groups as in the category of graphs. In other words they depend on set theory: (1) is equivalent to weak Vopěnka's principle and (2) to Vopěnka's principle. Additionally, the second question, considered in the homotopy category, is also equivalent to Vopěnka's principle.     

Sets versus trial sequences,Hausdorff versus von Mises: “Pure” mathematics prevails in the foundations of probability around 1920

The paper discusses the tension which occurred between the notions of set (with measure) and (trial-) sequence (or—to a certain degree—between nondenumerable and denumerable sets) when used in the foundations of probability theory around 1920. The main mathematical point was the logical need for measures in order to describe general nondiscrete distributions, which had been tentatively introduced before (1919) based on von Mises’s notion of the “Kollektiv.” In the background there was a tension between the standpoints of pure mathematics and “real world probability” (in the words of J.L. Doob) at the time. The discussion and publication in English translation (in Appendix) of two critical letters of November 1919 by the “pure” mathematician Felix Hausdorff to the engineer and applied mathematician Richard von Mises compose about one third of the paper. The article also investigates von Mises’s ill-conceived effort to adopt measures and his misinterpretation of an influential book of Constantin Carathéodory. A short and sketchy look at the subsequent development of the standpoints of the pure and the applied mathematician—here represented by Hausdorff and von Mises—in the probability theory of the 1920s and 1930s concludes the paper.