Founded in 1931 by Otto Neugebauer as the printed documentation service “Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete”, Zentralblatt MATH (ZBMATH) celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2011. Today it is the most comprehensive and active reference database in pure and applied mathematics worldwide. Many prominent mathematicians have been involved in this service as reviewers or editors and have, like all mathematicians, left their footprints in ZBMATH, in a long list of entries describing all of their research publications in mathematics. This book provides one review from each of the 80 years of ZBMATH. Names like Courant, Kolmogorov, Hardy, Hirzebruch, Faltings and many others can be found here. In addition to the original reviews, the book offers the authors' profiles indicating their co-authors, their favorite journals and the time span of their publication activities. In addition to this, a generously illustrated essay by Silke Göbel describes the history of ZBMATH.

This volume brings together scholars across various domains of the history and philosophy of mathematics, investigating duality as a multi-faceted phenomenon. Encompassing both systematic analysis and historical examination, the book endeavors to elucidate the status, roles, and dynamics of duality within the realms of 19th and 20th-century mathematics. Eschewing a priori notions, the contributors embrace the diverse interpretations and manifestations of duality, thus presenting a nuanced and comprehensive perspective on this intricate subject. Spanning a broad spectrum of mathematical topics and historical periods, the book uses detailed case studies to investigate the different forms in which duality appeared and still appears in mathematics, to study their respective histories, and to analyze interactions between the different forms of duality. The chapters inquire into questions such as the contextual occurrences of duality in mathematics, the influence of chosen forms of representation, the impact of investigations of duality on mathematical practices, and the historical interconnections among various instances of duality. Together, they aim to answer a core question: Is there such a thing as duality in mathematics, or are there just several things called by the same name and similar in some respect? What emerges is that duality can be considered as a basic structure of mathematical thinking, thereby opening new horizons for the research on the history and the philosophy of mathematics and the reflection on mathematics in general. The volume will appeal not only to experts in the discipline but also to advanced students of mathematics, history, and philosophy intrigued by the complexities of this captivating subject matter.

Collects essays on mathematics, from the mathematical aspects of origami and the mathematics of dating to the frequency and distribution of prime numbers and a ball in five dimensions.

This volume contains eighteen papers that have been collected by the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics. It showcases rigorously-reviewed contemporary scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics, as well as the teaching of the history of mathematics. Some of the topics explored include Arabic editions of Euclid’s Elements from the thirteenth century and their role in the assimilation of Euclidean geometry into the Islamic intellectual tradition Portuguese sixteenth century recreational mathematics as found in the Tratado de Prática Darysmetica A Cambridge correspondence course in arithmetic for women in England in the late nineteenth century The mathematical interests of the famous Egyptologist Thomas Eric (T. E.) Peet The history of Zentralblatt für Mathematik and Mathematical Reviews and their role in creating a publishing infrastructure for a global mathematical literature The use of Latin squares for agricultural crop experiments at the Rothamsted Experimental Station The many contributions of women to the advancement of computing techniques at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s The volume concludes with two short plays, one set in Ancient Mesopotamia and the other in Ancient Egypt, that are well suited for use in the mathematics classroom. Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible not only to mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also to anyone with a general interest in mathematics.

The papers appearing in this volume are part of those originally intended for presentation at the conference: Logic Colloquium '80 - European Summer Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic (A.S.L.) which was to takeplace in Prague, August 24·30, 1980, principally under the auspices of the Czech Academy of Sciences. There were 36 invited speakers from Western and Eastern Europe, Israel, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R. The local organizingcommittee cabled participants on July 15, 1980 to inform them that the meeting was cancelled for technical reasons; a subsequent communication stated that the cancellation was due to unforeseen circumstances lying beyond the controlof the organizing committee. The unexpected cancellation of the Prague meeting was greatly regretted, since so much care, time, and energy had been given to its advance preparation by the local organizing committee as well as by representatives of the A.S.L.and its European Committee. The late date on which cancellation took place required drastic changes of plans by speakers and participants. Last-minute efforts to reschedule the meeting elsewhere in Europe could not be realized.

This book chronicles the Society's activities over fifty years, as membership grew, as publications became more numerous and diverse, as the number of meetings and conferences increased, and as services to the mathematical community expanded. To download free chapters of this book, click here.