Mathematics and the Historian's Craft: The Kenneth O. May Lectures

This collection of twelve essays, constituting nigh on the full set of Kenneth O. May Lectures given at the Annual Meetings of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics since 1988, are presented in this volume as a tribute to Kenneth May himself, one of the founding fathers of the CSHPM.

The essays, varying greatly in nature as well as scope, concern themes of interest to the Society and, by extension, to Kenneth May. My own tastes run to the following samples: Ivor Grattan-Guiness’ preliminary (and cautionary?) discussion of the interplay between mathematical history and mathematical heritage; Judith Grabiner’s discussion of whether Newton’s calculus was a dead end (read the essay to find out Grabiner’s answer to this provocative question); Karen Hunger Parshall on the emergence of the American mathematical research community; and Joseph Dauben’s remarkably insightful and informative essay on Cantor’s set theory, filled with a wealth of information about Georg Cantor himself, and also some of his contemporaries.

I wish to call special attention however to two long articles by Rudiger Thiele, titled, “The Mathematics and Science of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783),” and “Hilbert and his Twenty-Four [!] Problems.” These articles burst at the seams with marvelous scholarship and insights and contain wonderful anecdotal material (as well as a large number of photographs and illustrations). The former article is in itself a beautiful compact biography of the most prolific mathematician of all (pace Erdös), while the latter discusses something altogether surprising and evocative: what was Hilbert’s twenty-fourth Paris problem, which he struck from his final list? It was to be “