Bücher der Reihe Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) gained world-wide fame by his incompleteness theorem of 1931. Later, he set as his aim to solve what are known as Hilbert's first and second problems, namely Cantor's continuum hypothesis about the cardinality of real numbers, and secondly the consistency of the theory of real numbers and functions. By 1940, he was halfway through the first problem, in what was his last published result in logic and foundations. His intense attempts thereafter at solving these two problems have remained behind the veil of a forgotten German shorthand he used in all of his writing. Results on Foundations is a set of four shorthand notebooks written in 1940-42 that collect results Gödel considered finished. Its main topic is set theory in which Gödel anticipated several decades of development. Secondly, Gödel completed his 1933 program of establishing the connections between intuitionistic and modal logic, by methods and results that today are at the same time new and 80 years old.The present edition of Gödel's four notebooks encompasses the 368 numbered pages and 126 numbered theorems of the Results on Foundations, together with a list of 74 problems on set theory Gödel prepared in 1946, and a list of an unknown date titled "The grand program of my research in ca. hundred questions.''

Most mathematicians' knowledge of Euclid's lost work on Porisms comes from a very brief and general description by Pappus of Alexandria. While Fermat and others made earlier attempts to explain the Porisms, it is Robert Simson who is generally recognised as the first person to achieve a genuine insight into the true nature of the subject.In this book, Ian Tweddle, a recognised authority on 18th century Scottish mathematics, presents for the first time a full and accessible translation of Simson's work. Based on Simson's early paper of 1723, the treatise, and various extracts from Simson's notebooks and correspondence, this book provides a fascinating insight into the work of an often-neglected figure. Supplemented by historical and mathematical notes and comments, this book is a valuable addition to the literature for anyone with an interest in mathematical history or geometry.

This is a history of parametric statistical inference, written by one of the most important historians of statistics of the 20th century, Anders Hald. This book can be viewed as a follow-up to his two most recent books, although this current text is much more streamlined and contains new analysis of many ideas and developments. And unlike his other books, which were encyclopedic by nature, this book can be used for a course on the topic, the only prerequisites being a basic course in probability and statistics.The book is divided into five main sections:* Binomial statistical inference;* Statistical inference by inverse probability;* The central limit theorem and linear minimum variance estimation by Laplace and Gauss;* Error theory, skew distributions, correlation, sampling distributions;* The Fisherian Revolution, 1912-1935.Throughout each of the chapters, the author provides lively biographical sketches of many of the main characters, including Laplace, Gauss, Edgeworth, Fisher, and Karl Pearson. He also examines the roles played by DeMoivre, James Bernoulli, and Lagrange, and he provides an accessible exposition of the work of R.A. Fisher.This book will be of interest to statisticians, mathematicians, undergraduate and graduate students, and historians of science.

The book is the first English translation of John Wallis's Arithmetica Infinitorum (1656), a key text on the seventeenth-century development of the calculus. Accompanied with annotations and an introductory essay, the translation makes Wallis's work fully available for the first time to modern readers. It shows how Wallis drew on some of the most important new ideas from the preceding twenty years, and took them forward to lay the foundations on which Newton was to build. Above all, the book displays the crucial mid-seventeenth-century shift from geometry to arithmetic and algebra as the primary language of mathematics.

I ?nd it impossible to write a preface to this work, without discovering a little of the enthusiasm which I have contracted from an attention to it. Joseph Priestley. The History and Present State of Electricity. It is generally considered bad form in writing, unless on matters autob- graphic,tomakeunbridleduseoftheperpendicularpronoun. Thereaderof the present book, however, may well wonder why one would want to study 1 the life and works of Thomas Bayes, 'this strangely neglected topic' , and it is only by a reluctant use of the ?rst person singular on the part of the author that this legitimate question can be answered. It was in the late 1960s that my interest in various aspects of subjective probability was awakened by some of the papers of I. J. ('Jack') Good, and this was followed by the reading of works such as Harold Je?reys's Theory of Probability. In many of these the (apparently simple) result known as Bayes's Theorem played a pivotal rE ole, and it struck me that it might be interesting to ?nd out a bit more about Thomas Bayes himself. In trying to satisfy this curiosity in spasmodic periods over many years I discovered that little information seemed to be available. Writings by John D.

- Following on from the 2000 edition of Jan De Witt's Elementa Curvarum Linearum, Liber Primus, this book provides the accompanying translation of the second volume of Elementa Curvarum Linearum (Foundations of Curved Lines). One of the first books to be published on Analytic Geometry, it was originally written in Latin by the Dutch statesman and mathematician Jan de Witt, soon after Descartes' invention of the subject. - Born in 1625, Jan de Witt served with distinction as Grand Pensionary of Holland for much of his adult life. In mathematics, he is best known for his work in actuarial mathematics as well as extensive contributions to analytic geometry.- Elementa Curvarum Linearum, Liber Secondus moves forward from the construction of the familiar conic sections covered in the Liber Primus, with a discussion of problems connected with their classification; given an equation, it covers how one can recover the standard form, and additionally how one can find the equation's geometric properties. - This volume, begun by Albert Grootendorst (1924-2004) and completed after his death by Jan Aarts, Reinie Ern and Miente Bakker, is supplemented by:- annotation explaining finer points of the translation;- extensive commentary on the mathematicsThese features make the work of Jan de Witt broadly accessible to today's mathematicians.

James Stirling's "e;Methodus Differentialis"e; is one of the early classics of numerical analysis. It contains not only the results and ideas for which Stirling is chiefly remembered, for example, Stirling numbers and Stirling's asymptotic formula for factorials, but also a wealth of material on transformations of series and limiting processes. An impressive collection of examples illustrates the efficacy of Stirling's methods by means of numerical calculations, and some germs of later ideas, notably the Gamma function and asymptotic series, are also to be found. This volume presents a new translation of Stirling's text that features an extensive series of notes in which Stirling's results and calculations are analysed and historical background is provided. Ian Tweddle places the text in its contemporary context, but also relates the material to the interests of practising mathematicians today. Clear and accessible, this book will be of interest to mathematical historians, researchers and numerical analysts.

This volume aims to make Stephen of Pisa and Antioch's work on the celestial sciences accessible to a wider readership, providing not just the text but a translation and introduction as well. It is split into two parts: the first provides an extensive introduction to Stephen and his work, while the second features the edition and translation.

It consists of six parts: Part I constitutes introductory articles which give an overview of the life and work of Prof. Part III consists of articles by Bibhutibhusan Datta and Avadhesh Narayan Singh-which together constitute the third unpublished part of their History of Hindu Mathematics-that were revised and updated by Prof.

This book will appeal to both graduate students and researchers with an interest in topology, the history of mathematics, the foundations of mathematics, philosophy and general science.

This book on focuses on the work of Ferdinand Frobenius in linear algebra, its relationship with the work of Burnside, Cartan, and Molien, and its extension by Schur and Brauer. Also covers the Berlin school of mathematics and the guiding force of Weierstrass.

This volume contains the texts and translations of two Arabic treatises on magic squares, which are undoubtedly the most important testimonies on the early history of that science.

Gerhard Gentzen is best known for his development of the proof systems of natural deduction and sequent calculus, central in many areas of logic and computer science today.

This book provides the first critical edition of Ibn al-Haytham's On the Shape of the Eclipse with English translation and commentary, which records the first scientific analysis of the camera obscura.

The book will be of particular interest to scholars engaged in the study of Islamic theoretical astronomy, but is accessible to a general readership interested in learning what constituted an introduction to Ptolemaic astronomy in Islamic lands.

This book provides a translation and commentary of the principal source on mathematics of 12th-century Islamic Spain, the Liber Mahameleth. It also analyzes all the problems from the text and includes a summary of the mathematical methods involved.

This fascinating insight into the minds of two great twentieth-century mathematicians affords an insider's view of the birth of modern probability theory as well as a revealing epistolary portrait spanning five decades of Levy and Frechet's academic careers.

Based on a modern approach incorporating recent insights, this book offers new translations and a new analysis of the procedure texts of Babylonian mathematical astronomy, the earliest known form of mathematical astronomy of the ancient world.

This book details the history of complex function theory. It examines the rise of elliptic function theory, differential equations in the complex domain, geometric function theory, and the early years of complex function theory in several variables.

Comprised of eight books, Apollonius's Conics was one of the greatest works of advanced mathematics in antiquity. This volume provides the first complete English translation of Edmond Halley's reconstruction of Book VIII with supplementary notes on the text.

The manuscript gives a detailed account of the theory of series in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It presents the subject from the viewpoint of the mathematicians of the period, and distinguishes earlier conceptions from ones that prevail today.

This translation offers a reconstruction of De Practica Geometrie as the author judges Fibonacci wrote it, thereby correcting inaccuracies found in numerous modern histories. It is a high quality translation and contains informative commentary preceding each chapter.

Deals with the development of the terms of analysis in the 18th and 19th centuries, the two main concepts being negative numbers and infinitesimals. Looking at German and French textbooks, this work reveals the history and throws light on major figures, such as Cauchy.

This review of literature on perspective constructions from the Renaissance through the 18th century covers 175 authors, emphasizing Peiro della Francesca, Guidobaldo del Monte, Simon Stevin, Brook Taylor, and Johann Heinrich.

This study discusses the history of the central limit theorem and related probabilistic limit theorems from about 1810 through 1950. Coverage extends to the historical development of analytical probability theory and its tools.