This scientific biography of the mathematician Joseph Liouville is divided into two parts. The first part is a chronological account of Liouville's career including a description of the institutions he worked in, his relations with his teachers, colleagues and students, and the historical context of his works. It portrays the French scientific community in a period when Germany and England had surpassed France as the leading nations in mathematics and physics. The second part of the book gives a detailed analysis of Liouville's major contributions to mathematics and mechanics. The gradual development of Liouville's ideas, as reflected in his publications and notebooks, are related to the works of his predecessors and his contemporaries as well as to later developments in the field. On the basis of Liouville's unpublished notes the book reconstructs Liouville's hitherto unknown theories of stability of rotating masses of fluid, potential theory, Galois theory and electrodynamics. It also incorporates valuable added information from Liouville's notes regarding his works on differentiation of arbitrary order, integration in finite terms, Sturm-Liouville theory, transcendental numbers, doubly periodic functions, geometry and mechanics.

Features a biographical sketch of the French mathematician Joseph Liouville (1809-1882), presented by the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. Notes that Liouville's mathematical work was extremely wide ranging and included mathematical physics, astronomy, and pure mathematics.

Enables teachers to learn the history of mathematics and then incorporate it in undergraduate teaching.

A gentle introduction to Liouville's powerful method in elementary number theory. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students.

N 1964 at the World's Fair in New York I City one room was dedicated solely to mathematics. The display included a very at tractive and informative mural, about 13 feet long, sponsored by one of the largest com puter manufacturing companies and present ing a brief survey of the history of mathemat ics. Entitled, "Men of Modern Mathematics," it gives an outline of the development of that science from approximately 1000 B. C. to the year of the exhibition. The first centuries of this time span are illustrated by pictures from the history of art and, in particular, architec ture; the period since 1500 is illuminated by portraits of mathematicians, including brief descriptions of their lives and professional achievements. Close to eighty portraits are crowded into a space of about fourteen square feet; among them, only one is of a woman. Her face-mature, intelligent, neither pretty nor handsome-may suggest her love of sci- 1 Emmy Noether ence and creative gift, but certainly reveals a likeable personality and a genuine kindness of heart. It is the portrait of Emmy Noether ( 1882 - 1935), surrounded by the likenesses of such famous men as Joseph Liouville (1809-1882), Georg Cantor (1845-1918), and David Hilbert (1862 -1943). It is accom panied by the following text: Emmy Noether, daughter of the mathemati cian Max, was often called "Der Noether," as if she were a man.

Ioan James introduces and profiles sixty mathematicians from the era when mathematics was freed from its classical origins to develop into its modern form. The subjects, all born between 1700 and 1910, come from a wide range of countries, and all made important contributions to mathematics, through their ideas, their teaching, and their influence. James emphasizes their varied life stories, not the details of their mathematical achievements. The book is organized chronologically into ten chapters, each of which contains biographical sketches of six mathematicians. The men and women James has chosen to portray are representative of the history of mathematics, such that their stories, when read in sequence, convey in human terms something of the way in which mathematics developed. Ioan James is a professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of Topological Topics (Cambridge, 1983), Fibrewise Topology (Cambridge, 1989), Introduction to Uniform Spaces (Cambridge, 1990), Topological and Uniform Spaces (Springer-Verlag New York, 1999), and co-author with Michael C. Crabb of Fibrewise Homotopy Theory (Springer-Verlag New York, 1998). James is the former editor of the London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series and volume editor of numerous books. He is the organizer of the Oxford Series of Topology symposia and other conferences, and co-chairman of the Task Force for Mathematical Sciences of Campaign for Oxford.