Maarten Bullynck, David E. Rowe
A Global and Cultural History of Mathematics. Aims and Challenges of a 6-Volume Project
The larger framework of the symposium is a 6-volume Cultural History of Mathematics which aims to bring the salient results of much excellent, but spe-cialized recent research in the history of mathematics to a larger public. Math-ematics will be understood in the broadest sense, its cultural manifestations ranging from temples to steam engines, from calendar-making to medical statistics.
David E. Rowe who is (with Joseph W. Dauben) the main editor of the project under contract with Bloomsbury and to be published in 2021, will describe the overall vision and outline the 6 planned volumes: They will chronologically map the evolution of mathematics from Antiquity to the 20th century. They will cov-er the history of mathematical research, describe the impact of mathematics on material culture, and focus on mathematics in everyday life as well as on its cultural images. Maarten Bullynck, editor of the 4th volume dealing with math-ematics in the 18th century, will follow up by explaining and illustrating some of the challenges the historians of mathematics are faced with in such a synthesiz-ing project.
Maarten Bullynck’s CV see here.
David E. Rowe studied mathematics and history of science at the University of Oklahoma from 1976 to 1981. Afterward, he took a second doctorate in history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York while teaching at Pace University. From 1983 to 1985 he was a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Göttingen, researching his dissertation topic: Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and the Göttingen Mathematical Tradition. Several related essays appeared in A Richer Picture of Mathematics: The Göttingen Tradition and Beyond (2018). In 1992 he was appointed Professor for History of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, where he taught for 25 years. With Robert Schulmann he co-edited the volume Einstein on Politics (2007). A major conference in Mainz led to the volume Beyond Einstein (2018), co-edited with Tilman Sauer and Scott A. Walter. Professor Rowe recently documented the career of Hilbert’s first doctoral student in two volumes, entitled Otto Blumenthal: Ausgewählte Briefe und Schriften (2018, 2019).