History of Mathematics – Mathematical Association of America

Featured Resources

The Proofs Project

By Jana Talley This installment of DUE Point features the Proofs Project, funded through NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program. To facilitate the development of students’ logical reasoning skills in introductory proofs courses, the project team designed instructional strategies and materials to invoke epistemological obstacles. They then provided instructors with professional development to implement...

The 2025 CBMS Survey

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. The 2025 CBMS Survey is currently underway. This survey of mathematics and statisticsdepartment in the United States has been conducted every five years starting in 1960 andprovides important information on practices and trends in undergraduate education in themathematical...

Kurt Gödel: The Genius of Metamathematics

Few twentieth-century logicians have acquired the cultural aura that now surrounds Kurt Gödel. While his incompleteness theorems secured his place in the foundations of mathematics soon after their publication in the early 1930s, his broader public reputation developed more gradually, fueled in part by later popular works that linked his ideas to themes of recursion...

Pentagons and Pentagrams: An Illustrated History

Veteran historian of mathematics and gifted expositor Eli Maor has built a distinguished career around exploring single mathematical themes in depth (the number e, the Pythagorean theorem, geometric beauty, …) and tracing their cultural and intellectual reverberations across centuries. In Pentagons and Pentagrams, richly illustrated by Swiss artist Eugen Jost, Maor turns his attention to...

Book cover of Pentagons and Pentagrams. At the top is a colorful geometric design made of interlocking three-dimensional pentagon-based shapes in red, blue, green, and orange arranged in a circular, star-like pattern with a yellow pentagon in the center. Below the design, the title “PENTAGONS and PENTAGRAMS” appears in large blue and red lettering, followed by the subtitle “An Illustrated History” in red. At the bottom, the credits read “Text by Eli Maor” and “Illustrations by Eugen Jost.” The background is light gray.

The Logical Syntax of Greek Mathematics

This book is an English version, with expansions and improvements, of the author’s La sintassi logica della matematica greca (2011, published online). Since this earlier work has received too little attention—perhaps partly for linguistic reasons—an English version is a welcome contribution to scholarship. That said, this book is still written for the specialist. It is directed to...

Abstract Algebra and Famous Impossibilities

Abstract Algebra and Famous Impossibilities aims to develop the abstract algebra necessary to prove the impossibility of four classical problems: trisecting the angle, doubling the cube, squaring the circle, and solving (in terms of radicals) the general quintic polynomial equation. The book is written in a very clear, friendly manner meant to make it accessible to...

The Polyhedrists: Art and Geometry in the Long Sixteenth Century

The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of great change and development. Just think of Copernicus and the heliocentric model of the universe. Or Martin Luther and his revolt against the Catholic Church for the practice of selling indulgences. Or painters using the theory of perspective to put a suggestion of three-dimensionality into their...

Felix Klein: Visions for Mathematics, Applications, and Education

Robert Fricke once compared Felix Klein to a triptych whose central panel concerns Klein's mathematical research, and whose flanking panels concern his interests in education and his organizational skills. As Tobies explains in her preface, "the goal of this book is to put this triptych into words and enrich it with a human dimension". Mathematically, Klein is...

A History of Mathematics in the United States and Canada: Volume 2: 1900-1941

David Zitarelli (1941–2018) was an ardent promoter of the history of mathematics whose contributions included co-organizing conference sessions, preparing numerous well-received articles and books, and encouraging younger scholars. He was especially interested in the history of American mathematics and taught a unique course on the subject for a decade at Temple University, his home throughout...

Against All Odds Women’s Ways to Mathematical Research Since 1800

Against all Odds: Women’s Ways to Mathematical Research Since 1800 (Springer, 2020, Cham, editors Eva Kaufholz-Soldat and Nicola M. R. Oswald) grew out of a “small conference on women in mathematics in Würzburg in 2015” followed by a workshop “Women in Mathematics: Historical and Modern Perspectives” at Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in 2017. Evidence...

Symbols and Things

Historians of mathematics and mathematicians are more interested in the statement and transmission of mathematical ideas than in how these ideas were incorporated into physical documents. In this volume, historian of science and mathematics Kevin Lambert seeks to shift this emphasis. He examines the “materiality” of mathematics as represented on paper in nineteenth century Britain,...

The Doctrine of Triangles: A History of Modern Trigonometry

With the publication of this book, Glen van Brummelen, the noted Canadian historian and specialist in mathematical astronomy, has completed a comprehensive, scholarly, and engaging two-volume “scientific history” of the origins and development of trigonometry. The first of these volumes, The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth, was published by Princeton University Press in...

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