Mathematical Treasure: Smith and Karpinski’s Hindu-Arabic Numerals

The mathematics educator and book collector David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) and the mathematician and book cataloguer Louis Charles Karpinski (1878–1956), both Americans, teamed up to prepare this history of The Hindu-Arabic Numerals (1911). Note the inscription on the title page to John Henry Tanner (1861–1940), a mathematics professor at Cornell University.

The preface and table of contents describe their plan for the work.

Pages showing the evolution of number symbols.

A full digitization of the copy owned by Cornell University is available at HathiTrust. The production note there suggests the book was printed on the highly-acidic paper stock of the early 20th century that crumbles over time. Hsiu-man Lin’s blog entry, Paper Acid-Deterioration: The Era of Bad Paper, provides an overview of this phenomenon.

Index to Mathematical Treasures