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The bibliography presents recent books, articles, and papers of interest to science historians and includes such categories as mathematics, astronomy and cosmology, chemistry, and geography, cartography, and exploration.

Open Court began publishing The Monist in 1890 as a journal "devoted to the philosophy of science" that regularly included mathematics. The audience was understood to be "cultured people who have not a technical mathematical training" but nevertheless "have a mathematical penchant." With these constraints, the mathematical content varied from recreations to logical foundations, but everyone had something to say about non-Euclidean geometry, in debates that ranged from psychology to semantics. The focus in this essay is on the contested value of mathematical expertise in legitimating what should be considered as mathematics. While some mathematicians urged The Monist to uphold disciplinary standards of geometrical reasoning, authors opposed to non-Euclidean geometry aligned their reasoning with practical applications, universal know-how, and nonhierarchical democracy. As one contributor inquired, "How is the professional expert better fitted to see more lucidly in dealing with the elements of geometry than any other person of good geometric faculty?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From classical times to the present, stories have been the constant companions of mathematical studies. Though seemingly simple in structure, these tales have both defined and expressed the nature of the mathematics, its relation to the world, and the roles of its practitioners. As popular tales, mathematical stories are shaped by the mores of their time and place, while at the same time they inform abstract and highly technical mathematical practices. Poised between the popular world of storytelling and the rarefied air of advanced mathematics, these stories are a key to relating mathematical practices to their cultural and historical setting. The three essays in this section explore different ways in which stories can be used in historicizing mathematical practices. Focused on the century between 1730 and 1830, they combine to tell the story of Enlightenment mathematics and its transformation in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1970s and 1980s, a team of Automated Theorem Proving researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago developed the Automated Reasoning Assistant, or AURA, to assist human users in the search for mathematical proofs. The resulting hybrid humansAURA system developed the capacity to make novel contributions to pure mathematics by very untraditional means. This essay traces how these unconventional contributions were made and made possible through negotiations between the humans and the AURA at Argonne and the transformation in mathematical intuition they produced. At play in these negotiations were experimental practices, nonhumans, and nonmathematical modes of knowing. This story invites an earnest engagement between historians of mathematics and scholars in the history of science and science studies interested in experimental practice, material culture, and the roles of nonhumans in knowledge making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on the book "Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development," edited by Joseph W. Dauben and Christoph J. Scriba.

Many people would like to know where scientific ideas come from and how they arise. In the case of mathematics, new ideas often come in the form of new "mathematical objects": groups, vector spaces, sets, etc. Some people think these new objects are invented, others that they are discovered. By exploring the birth of descriptive set theory in France and Russia in the period 1890-1930 we show that the leading French mathematicians worked within a rational, secular worldview that made them doubt the legitimacy of infinite sets, particularly nondenumerable ones; on the other hand, the creators of the famous Moscow school of mathematics, particularly those who subscribed to a religious doctrine known as "name-worshipping," believed that humans had absolute freedom to invent mathematical objects. Partly as a result of their different cultural environments, the French and the Russians took different approaches to the same problem. In the end the Russians created a new field, descriptive set theory, at a time when the French remained hesitant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a list of articles related to the field of science and other academic disciplines published in several journals. "Give Pierce a Chance," by Anne Morgan; "Perception and Illusion: Historical Perspectives," by Nicholas J. Wade; "Countable Additivity and the de Finetti Lottery," by Paul Bartha; "Mathematics and Spiritual Interpretation: A Bridge to Genuine Interdisciplinary," by Ronald Glasberg; "The Erratic Ways of Studying Astronomy in Culture," by Stanislaw Iwaniszewski.

Presents information on the book "Essays on Early Medieval Mathematics: The Latin Tradition," edited by Menso Folkerts.

Presents information on the book "Mathematics and War," edited by Bernhelm Booβ-Bavnbek and Jens Høyrup.