Part of the A Century of Mathematics in America collection, this book contains articles that describe the mathematics and the mathematical personalities in some of the nations' prominent departments: Johns Hopkins, Clark, Columbia, MIT, Michigan, Texas, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented development in mathematics, as well as in all sciences: more theorems were proved and results found in a hundred years than in all of previous history. In The Mathematical Century, Piergiorgio Odifreddi distills this unwieldy mass of knowledge into a fascinating and authoritative overview of the subject. He concentrates on thirty highlights of pure and applied mathematics. Each tells the story of an exciting problem, from its historical origins to its modern solution, in lively prose free of technical details. Odifreddi opens by discussing the four main philosophical foundations of mathematics of the nineteenth century and ends by describing the four most important open mathematical problems of the twenty-first century. In presenting the thirty problems at the heart of the book he devotes equal attention to pure and applied mathematics, with applications ranging from physics and computer science to biology and economics. Special attention is dedicated to the famous "23 problems" outlined by David Hilbert in his address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900 as a research program for the new century, and to the work of the winners of the Fields Medal, the equivalent of a Nobel prize in mathematics. This eminently readable book will be treasured not only by students and their teachers but also by all those who seek to make sense of the elusive macrocosm of twentieth-century mathematics.

Part of the "History of Mathematics" series, this book presents a variety of perspectives on the political, social, and mathematical forces that have shaped the American mathematical community.

An exploration of the life and work of the thirteenth-century mathematician Ch'in, this fascinating book examines a range of mathematical issues that reflect Chinese life of a millennium ago. Its first part consists of four closely related studies of Ch'in and his work. The first study brings together what is known of the mathematician's life and of the history of his only extant work, the Shu-shu chiu-chang. Subsequent studies examine the entire range of mathematical techniques and problems found within Ch'in's book. The core of this book consists of an in-depth study of what modern mathematicians still refer to as the Chinese remainder theorem for the solution of indeterminate equations of the first degree. This was Ch'in's most original contribution to mathematics--so original that no one could correctly explain Ch'in's procedure until the early nineteenth century. This volume's concluding study unites information on artisanal, economic, administrative, and military affairs dispersed throughout Ch'in's writings, providing rare insights into thirteenth-century China.

In these selected essays, Charles Parsons surveys the contributions of philosophers and mathematicians who shaped the philosophy of mathematics over the past century: Brouwer, Hilbert, Bernays, Weyl, Gödel, Russell, Quine, Putnam, Wang, and Tait.

This book addresses the historiography of mathematics as it was practiced during the 19th and 20th centuries by paying special attention to the cultural contexts in which the history of mathematics was written. In the 19th century, the history of mathematics was recorded by a diverse range of people trained in various fields and driven by different motivations and aims. These backgrounds often shaped not only their writing on the history of mathematics, but, in some instances, were also influential in their subsequent reception. During the period from roughly 1880-1940, mathematics modernized in important ways, with regard to its content, its conditions for cultivation, and its identity; and the writing of the history of mathematics played into the last part in particular. Parallel to the modernization of mathematics, the history of mathematics gradually evolved into a field of research with its own journals, societies and academic positions. Reflecting both a new professional identity and changes in its primary audience, various shifts of perspective in the way the history of mathematics was and is written can still be observed to this day. Initially concentrating on major internal, universal developments in certain sub-disciplines of mathematics, the field gradually gravitated towards a focus on contexts of knowledge production involving individuals, local practices, problems, communities, and networks. The goal of this book is to link these disciplinary and methodological changes in the history of mathematics to the broader cultural contexts of its practitioners, namely the historians of mathematics during the period in question.