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Between 1809 and 1820, Thomas Knight (1775–1853) published quite a few papers on mathematics and its applications. These show him to have been surprisingly well-versed in French analytical mathematics at a time when French works were little read by his British contemporaries. InBSHM Bulletin2, Gloria Edwards and I published a paper (Craik and Edwards 2004) entitled ‘In search of Thomas Knight’, designated below as ‘[1]’, that examined Knight’s life and work. This follow-up paper gives further biographical information that links him with Edinburgh; it describes some more of his publications that were previously overlooked (for notice of the latter, I am grateful to a correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous); and it records some remarks about his work by his contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper was delivered as the John Fauvel Lecture to the BSHM on 22 September 2007. In it Muriel Seltman examines some of the key concepts in Harriot's posthumous Artis analyticae praxis of 1631, and assesses the book's importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twentieth century the theory of games was transformed. It began as an amusing pastime, and ended as a major branch of mathematical research and a key paradigm of economic theory. Here it will be argued that the transformation was the result of the work of mathematicians, such as Ernst Zermelo, John von Neumann and Dénes Kőnig, who also contributed to two other areas of mathematics that were emerging at the same time: the theory of sets and the theory of graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two main British exponents of the theory of invariants, Arthur Cayley and James Joseph Sylvester, first encountered the idea of an “invariant” in an 1841 paper by George Boole. In the 1850s, Cayley, Sylvester, and the Irish mathematician, George Salmon, formulated the basic concepts, developed the key techniques, and set the research agenda for the field. As Cayley and Sylvester continued to extend the theory off and on through the 1880s, first Salmon in 1859 and later Edwin Bailey Elliott in 1895 codified it in high-level textbooks. This paper sketches the development of nineteenth-century invariant theory in British hands against a backdrop of personal, nationalistic, and internationalistic mathematical goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In western Europe, a sophisticated banking system for the purposes of international trade had evolved by the end of the thirteenth century. It was based upon the 'bill of exchange', which enabled an exporter of goods to receive payment in his own currency, by means of a balancing payment made in the currency of the importer. This paper discusses the arithmetical tools that were available for use in accounting for transactions made in different currencies. It is argued that algorithmic methods based on the Hindu-Arabic numerals were used at the higher levels of banking, in order to prepare tables of foreign exchange such as those collected by the Florentine banker, Francesco Pegolotti. On the other hand, the clerks who were responsible for routine book-keeping would have used a simple abacus and counters, and recorded their transactions in Roman numerals. The paper is based on a talk given to the BSHM at Gresham College on 25 April 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides updates concerning the field of mathematics as of March 2007. The British National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists has received a grant for a project on the archives of British physicists and mathematicians. A team of mathematicians and computer scientists in the U.S. has developed a pedagogical technique for teaching material in discrete mathematics. A quantity of primary and secondary materials for the history of mathematics is available online.

Is there such a thing as Irish mathematics, as opposed to mathematics which happens to have been done in Ireland or by thoseborn in Ireland? Certainly, Ireland in the nineteenth century was in one of its mathematically richest phases, with such men as William Rowan Hamilton, James MacCullagh, George Salmon, and George Fitzgerald to inspire generations of students and researchers, as well as exporting to England such talented mathematicians as Kelvin, Stokes and Larmor. This paper seeks to explore, through examining the mathematics taught and researched, whether the category of ‘Irish mathematics’ is one that makes sense for this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a deliberately provocative first part to this paper, I argue that nineteenth-century British mathematicians had an unduly high opinion of themselves and a striking lack of appreciation for contemporary continental developments. I argue that this failure was rooted in the institutions that supported mathematics, and was only remedied towards the end of the century. In the more sober second half of the paper I ask if historians of mathematics have subscribed to this overestimate, and explore some related questions, among them what are historians doing when they write history: telling it as it was, or righting or defending the record? Historians of mathematics also need to consider British priorities for research in the nineteenth century, and a comparison with other minor players (such as Japan, Portugal, or Poland) might be illuminating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Victorian era was characterized by the dominance of Great Britain both militarily and economically, the achievements of the British in mathematics were considerably less spectacular. Nevertheless, significant contributions were made by British mathematicians, several of whose names are still well known today. This paper highlights the principal mathematical developments in Britain during this time, closing with some observations on the weaknesses and limitations of Victorian British mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New archival evidence from Urbino provides a rare insight into the production and distribution of a mathematical textbook in seventeenth-century Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location problems represent a popular class of optimization problems in the field of logistics, and their applications play a key role in strategic planning activities related to both manufacturing and service industries. This paper presents a historical perspective of their evolution, from the historic challenge posed by Pierre de Fermat, through the contributions by Torricelli, Viviani, Simpson, Heinen, and other researchers, to Weber’s intuition about a practical use of the results of that challenge, and its subsequent developments. Modern developments of the discipline are also reviewed. There is particular emphasis on the work of pioneering researchers who provided seminal contributions to the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is based on a lecture given at the meeting Euler's mathematical legacy held in Oxford in June 2007 and organized by the Open University Centre for the History of the Mathematical Sciences and the BSHM. It explores Euler's contributions to combinatorics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the question of how Francis Galton came to devise the quincunx, a pin-board that simulates the effect of a large number of Bernoulli trials to yield an empirical normal curve. It suggests that the likely inspiration for the design was some variant of bagatelle. The argument forms a small part of an Open University doctoral thesis (May 2005), which revealed the extent of the support Galton received from George Howard Darwin as he developed the concept of statistical regression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is presented about the symposium titled "The History of the History of Mathematics Research" held at Oxford University on December 16-17, 2010. Topics included case studies of mathematicians Thomas Harriot, John Wallis, and Évariste Galois, Medieval beliefs regarding the ancient geometry of Euclid's "Elements," and the early modern mathematics of Peter Ramus and Henry Savile. Presenters at the symposium included Jackie Stedall, Steve Russ, and Jeremy Gray.

This article describes items in the Science Museum, London, that have been invented for the purpose of avoiding mental calculation. As far as possible they are assessed as to whether or not they could be regarded as successful. They are also discussed in the context of the perennial debate as to whether avoiding arithmetic is desirable or not. The article is based on a talk given to a BSHM meeting on the Mechanisation of Mathematics, held at Rewley House, Oxford, in 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Rowan Hamilton (1805-65) and George Boole (1815-64) never had any significant interaction with each other even though they shared many of the same mathematical interests and simultaneously corresponded with Augustus de Morgan. They also had much in common beyond mathematics, in particular in their philosophical views, and in certain personality traits that contributed significantly to their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts presented at the Eighth British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) meetings on mathematics which include activities of British mathematicians during World War I, musical instruments and mathematical instruments and musical experiments.

Hard times is a satire against mid-Victorian statisticians, those whom Dickens called 'the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time'. Historians of mathematics have seen the novel as a cruel parody of statistical determinism, a fatalistic movement which swept the continent in the 1860s and 1870s. But to see it as such is to credit Dickens with a better understanding of contemporary mathematics than he in fact possessed. The statistics in Hard times are not the probabilistic theories of continental academics. They are the mundane facts and figures of the much more prosaic English statistical movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics: the Winton Gallerystrives, like any exhibition concerning mathematics, to make meaningful contact between the abstruse realms of mathematics and the viewing audience. Unlike many other exhibitions, this is here accomplished by displaying a rich range of objects that demonstrate the essential role of mathematics in the world by emphasizing connections to the viewers’ existing cognitive environments. Through a focus on the ways that mathematical work affects and informs our human world, the exhibition succeeds in connecting a mathematical way of thinking with the lives of the viewing public in a complex and profound way, in exchange for their efforts and attention. While an approach which places the interweave of life and mathematics at its centre may invite worries about the representation of pure mathematics or whether such a strategy insulates the viewer from an understanding of ‘real’ mathematics, what this exhibition does is to offer a sense of the mind-set that underscores mathematical work. By revealing the implications of this mode of thought, the exhibition encourages the audience to understand their own lives and world in a more mathematically-oriented way, while also encouraging them to understand mathematics in terms of the ways their human world is already formed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the highlights of the Sixth British Society for the History of Mathematics-Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics Joint Meeting held in Washington, D.C. on August 5-8, 2015.

The article discusses a meeting of the organization the Joint Mathematical Council of the UK (JMC) on November 5, 2013. According to the article, the meeting marked the 50th anniversary of the organization. The article states that the meeting was chaired by scholar Sir Peter Williams and that several presentations were made by scholars including professor Sir Bryan Thwaites, JMC Executive Sally Barton, and professor Margaret Brown.

The article discusses various articles in the issue about Victorian mathematics, including one by Mel Bayley about author Charles Dickens's views on statistics, and another one by Judith Grabiner that dispels various myths in mathematics.

A list of publications on mathematics is presented, including "Number and Numbers", "A History of Mathematics" and "Discovering the Principles of Mechanics 1600-1800."

The sources cited within this issue are presented including "Sobolev Institute of Mathematics Celebrates Its Fiftieth Anniversary," by V. Alexandro, "Christiaan Huygens and the Problem of the Hanging Chain," by J. Bukowski and "Number Crunching Without Programming: The Evolution of Spreadsheet Usability," by M. Campbell-Kelly.

A chance encounter at Bournemouth between Francis Galton and John Venn has lain in some obscurity because of a slip by Galton himself and a second mistake by Karl Pearson. The contact with Venn provides insight into the development of Galton's perception of statistical dispersion, his disenchantment with the notion of 'probable error' and adoption of population variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the role John Playfair (1748-1819) played in creating and popularizing the myth that mathematical development halted in Great Britain in the eighteenth century due to mathematicians' irrational attachment to a geometrical approach to the calculus. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Playfair had established his reputation as an energetic teacher, gifted expositor, and skilled natural philosopher. He served as joint professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and as general secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, editing the Society's Transactions, while his written accomplishments included Elements of geometry (1795) and Illustrations of the Huttonian theory of the earth (1802). He then contributed his talents to the opinionated journal, Edinburgh Review, where his assessments of the contemporary state of mathematics reached a wide audience of intellectuals, gentlemen, and merchants, albeit anonymously. The article expands upon a section of a talk delivered to the Fourth Joint Meeting of the BSHM and CSHPM in Montreal, 27-29 July 2007 (see also Ackerberg-Hastings 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an overview of the life and work of Leonhard Euler (1707-83). During 2007 Euler's tercentenary was celebrated by mathematicians around the world. The Open University Centre for the History of the Mathematical Sciences and the BSHM marked the occasion with a meeting in Oxford in June 2007 on Euler's mathematical legacy. Three of the lectures from that meeting have been reproduced in this issue of the Bulletin, beginning here with the opening talk from Jeremy Gray. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of articles on mathematics is presented. They include "John Todd: Numerical Mathematics Pioneer," written by D. Albers and published in "The College Mathematics Journal;" "From Human Nature to Normal Humanity: Joseph de Maistre, Rousseau and the Origins of Moral Statistics," written by C. Armenteros and published in the "Journal of the History of Ideas;" and "Why Rob Archimedes of His Lemma?," written by L. Borzacchini and published in the "Mediterranean Journal of Mathematics."

This is the text of the keynote lecture delivered to the Research in Progress meeting of the British Society for the History of Mathematics at The Queen's College, Oxford, 24 February 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of the US ‘math wars’ from 1980, and discusses the political polarizations that fuelled and resulted from the disagreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the great period of Greek geometry, an intriguing construction challenge was posed by Apollonius. Some eighteen centuries later, there was revived interest in the problem, and it continues today. François Viète, Isaac Newton, and Joseph-Diaz Gergonne were among the many mathematicians who solved the problem. They lived in different eras and had very different approaches. Viète stayed close to geometric fundamentals, Newton used his grasp of conics, and Gergonne employed a new understanding of inversion geometry properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Salmon achieved prominence both as a mathematician and theologian during the nineteenth century. He was one of the originators, with Cayley and Sylvester, of invariant theory in the 1850s, and published a series of four textbooks on geometric topics which incorporate many of his discoveries. These works in their several editions were pre-eminent in the mathematical literature for fifty years and more, and were translated into most major European languages. I present here a brief survey of Salmon's life and work, drawing on some less familiar sources and revealing aspects of his work and character that are not mentioned in the standard biographical sources. The essay is an extended version of a lecture given by the author at Trinity College Dublin on 6 April 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This talk, given at the BSHM Textbooks Meeting in September 2005, is in two parts. First it looks at some of the English editions of the Elements published over the last 450 years. Then, to show how various editors differed in the way they approached the text, it looks at their treatments of Pythagoras’ Theorem (Book I, Proposition 47). Finally, it draws attention to some texts from the Fauvel Collection that either derive from the Elements or are closely connected with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes meetings concerning the organization the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) including a "History of Computing in Three Parts" at Gresham College in London, England, on October 31, 2013, "A Chance Encounter': A talk by scholar Richard Simpson about 17th century mathematics" in Manchester, England, on November 12, 2013, and the BSHM Christmas meeting at the Birmingham and Midland Institute on December 7, 2013.