Showing papers in "Historia Mathematica in 2020"

TL;DR: Some historic background on Serdyukov's findings is provided and a translation of his article from Russian into English is provided.

TL;DR: The history of the genus of a Riemann surface was investigated in this article, where it was shown that Clebsch's act of naming was rooted in a projective geometric reinterpretation of the original genus.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the evolution of a specific mathematical problem, i.e., the nine-point conic, a generalisation of the ninepoint circle due to Steiner, and follow this evolution from Steiner to the Neapolitan school (Trudi and Battaglini).

TL;DR: Neugebauer and Peet as mentioned in this paper described two letters of 1926 from the historian of mathematics to the Egyptologist Thomas Eric Peet ( Griffith Institute Archive, Oxford: Peet MSS 4.9).

TL;DR: This paper explored Bolzano's early mathematical works and diaries to gain insight into the subtleties in his definition of variable quantities ω and some of his mathematical procedures, and argued that those quantities are not clearly proto-Weierstrassian.

TL;DR: The Eulerian foundations of analysis have been criticised by as mentioned in this paper, who pointed out that analysis was not an autonomous and self-founding field of mathematics but only a method for solving geometrical problems.

TL;DR: It is shown that the author, Ibrāhīm al-Balīshṭār, is a hitherto unknown Morisco mathematician from Aragon, and his treatise is actually an elaborate personal work, resulting from the intertwining of two Spanish treatises and material drawn from Arabic authors.

TL;DR: Somerville's earliest known mathematical work, namely her published and unpublished solutions to questions posed in the New Series of the Mathematical Repository, alongside her contemporary correspondence with mathematicians John and William Wallace, demonstrate her active engagement in the circulation of the differential calculus twenty years earlier than previously appreciated.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze different mathematical instruments used in different domains in 12th and 13th century China and argue that there existed two categories of mathematical problems, problems, textual procedures, and material operations.

TL;DR: The authors explored Mittag-Leffler's active and deliberate efforts to engage his students Ivar Bendixson and Edvard Phragmen in open problems within his own research agenda, support them through his institutional connections, and instill within them norms concerning research ideologies, practices of communication and criticism, and frameworks for shared knowledge.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reassess the theory that numeracy evolved universally from a concrete to an abstract concept of number, and that that shift is correlated with the invention of writing, and gather contemporary linguistic data and early Mesopotamian epigraphic evidence that indicates that the "concrete" vs. "abstract" dichotomy is not useful to understand the emergence of numbers.

TL;DR: In this paper, the sukunnum-number is used to keep accounts of barley yield rates, but it is not associated with a specific unit of measurement, such as surface and capacity units.

TL;DR: The history of Liouville's identities is of remarkable interest especially as far as the methods used to prove them are concerned as discussed by the authors, especially in the case of elliptic functions.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the development of actuarial calculus in Portugal until the late 19th century, in order to contextualise the scientific progress of those institutions, mainly the former.

TL;DR: Carlini's career was mainly dedicated to astronomy, but he was also a particularly skilled mathematician as discussed by the authors, who introduced an innovative idea to solve ordinary differential equations with singular perturbations by means of asymptotic expansions.

TL;DR: Sheppard's normal probability tables were the first set of modern tables for the standard normal distribution and have been widely used since the early 20th century as mentioned in this paper, and they were used for the correction of moment estimates.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the application of probability to design exams and analyze their outcomes, and they consider the case of the finite rule of succession in the context of calculus.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors summarize a book by Aida Yasuaki (1747-1817) in which he strongly criticizes the use of trigonometry for wasan, and try to find the origins of his antipathy.