Category Archives: history

the shadow of the past

Conference walks, 2

Posted on 16/06/2013 by

An update on the walks on 7 and 11 July: see here for the original post. Lists of people who have signed up already are at the end of this post, and I will keep them updated. Please give me … Continue reading →

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Hadamard revisited

Posted on 28/05/2013 by

After a conversation about mathematical creativity yesterday, I went back to Hadamard’s remarkable book The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (published in 1945, and re-issued in 1996 with a new preface and the snappier title The Mind of … Continue reading →

Posted in doing mathematics, history | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A history of Merton College

Posted on 23/05/2013 by

The book A History of Merton College, by G. H. Martin and J. R. L. Highfield, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. I have had a copy for some time but, to my shame, have only just read it. Roger Highfield was a … Continue reading →

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Kilvington’s Sophismata

Posted on 22/05/2013 by

The last chapter of Mathematical Structures was about how to spot false proofs. Of course, I am not the first to do this. A curious chain (I may tell about this later) led me to The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington. … Continue reading →

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Conference proceedings

Posted on 19/05/2013 by

In some subjects, a paper in a prestigious conference proceedings is the pinnacle of a researcher’s career. It has never really been so in mathematics, and is now less so than ever. This is partly, I think, because of the … Continue reading →

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Gregory’s pillar

Posted on 28/04/2013 by

The article Gregory’s meridian line of 1673–1674: A St Andrews detective story by John Ceres Amson in the 2008 BSHM Bulletin tells how James Gregory, the first Regius Professor of Mathematics in the University of St Andrews, defined a meridian … Continue reading →

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Beechwoods

Posted on 15/04/2013 by

The most beautiful tree in the world is the eucalyptus. If you know it only from backyard trees in Britain, or plantations around the Mediterranean, you will not agree; but if you have seen mountain ash in the Dandenongs, or … Continue reading →

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Scottish history

Posted on 10/04/2013 by

Some of my ancestors lived in the west of Scotland, around Fort William. The clan was badly damaged by its participation in the 1745 uprising of Bonnie Prince Charlie; indeed, Lochiel was warned by a kinsman not to let the … Continue reading →

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Two statisticians revisited

Posted on 11/03/2013 by

Two years ago, I described walking, each week, past the tombs of Thomas Bayes and Richard Price in the nonconformist burial ground at Bunhill Fields in London, and wondered about the extent to which Bayes’ Theorem, or its interpretation as … Continue reading →

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Abelian groups

Posted on 22/02/2013 by

This post is inspired by a very nice paper by Henrik Kragh Sørensen in the current issue of the Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, entitled “What’s Abelian about abelian groups?” Abel worked and died long … Continue reading →

Posted in books, history, mathematics | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments