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Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), raised in Louisville, Kentucky in a family of poor Jewish immigrants from Germany, attended the Johns Hopkins University in the first decade of its existence. After graduating in 1886, he founded, four years before John Dewey’s Chicago “laboratory school,” a progressive experimental school in Louisville that won the attention of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot. After a successful nineteen years as teacher and principal, he turned his attention to medical education on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation. His 1910 survey — known as the Flexner Report — stimulated much-needed, radical changes in American medical schools. With its emphasis on full-time cli...
Part of the "History of Mathematics" series, this book presents a variety of perspectives on the political, social, and mathematical forces that have shaped the American mathematical community.
'Analysis situs' is the name used by Poincaré when he was creating, at the end of the 19th century, the area of mathematics known today as topology. These lectures contain what is probably the first text where Poincaré's results and ideas were summarized, and an attempt to systematically present this difficult new area of mathematics was made. Of the two streams of topology existing at that time, point set topology and combinatorial topology, it is the latter to which this book is almost totally devoted. The first four chapters present, in detail, the notion and properties (introduced by Poincaré) of the incidence matrix of a cell decomposition of a manifold. The author's main goal is to show how to reproduce main topological invariants of a manifold and their relations in terms of the incidence matrix.
Cover -- Title page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Photograph and Figure Credits -- Chapter 1. An overview of American mathematics: 1776-1876 -- Chapter 2. A new departmental prototype: J.J. Sylvester and the Johns Hopkins University -- Chapter 3. Mathematics at Sylvester's Hopkins -- Chapter 4. German mathematics and the early mathematical career of Felix Klein -- Chapter 5. America's wanderlust generation -- Chapter 6. Changes on the horizon -- Chapter 7. The World's Columbian exposition of 1893 and the Chicago mathematical congress -- Chapter 8. Surveying mathematical landscapes: The Evanston colloquium lectures -- Chapter 9. Meeting the challenge: The University of Chicago and the American mathematical research community -- Chapter 10. Epilogue: Beyond the threshold: The American mathematical research community, 1900-1933 -- Bibliography -- Subject Index -- Back Cover
A remarkable account of the brilliant, troubled mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel. From his famous Incompleteness Theorem, which shook the foundations of mathematical truth, to his perilous escape from Nazi Vienna, this book weaves together his creative genius, mental illness, and idealism in the face of adversity.
The influential economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was one of the most original and penetrating critics of American culture and institutions, and his work attracted and still attracts the attention of scholars from a wide range of political viewpoints and scholarly disciplines. Focusing on the doctrinal and theoretical facets of Veblen's political economy, this book offers a study not only of his ideas but also of the way his critics have responded to them. Rick Tilman assesses the weight of the critics' reactions, both positive and negative, as well as exposing their sometimes mistaken interpretations of Veblen's work. As he scrutinizes the ideologies of the conservative...
The first history of postwar mathematics, offering a new interpretation of the rise of abstraction and axiomatics in the twentieth century. Why did abstraction dominate American art, social science, and natural science in the mid-twentieth century? Why, despite opposition, did abstraction and theoretical knowledge flourish across a diverse set of intellectual pursuits during the Cold War? In recovering the centrality of abstraction across a range of modernist projects in the United States, Alma Steingart brings mathematics back into the conversation about midcentury American intellectual thought. The expansion of mathematics in the aftermath of World War II, she demonstrates, was characteriz...
The field of geometry reflects a conglomeration of discoveries over time. Filled with detailed diagrams, this insightful volume offers serious students a comprehensive understanding of the fundamentals of geometry, including geometric shapes, axioms, and formulas. In addition, it covers some of the field's most illustrious minds, from Euclid to Wendelin Werner, figures who have helped produce the various branches of geometry as we know them today. This enlightening volume will help students understand the principles of geometry, and also the fascinating story behind the numbers.