In the folklore of mathematics, James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897) is the eccentric, hot-tempered, sword-cane-wielding, nineteenth-century British Jew who, together with the taciturn Arthur Cayley, developed a theory and language of invariants that then died spectacularly in the 1890s as a result of David Hilbert's groundbreaking, 'modern' techniques. This, like all folklore, has some grounding in fact but owes much to fiction. The present volume brings together for the first time 140 letters from Sylvester's correspondence in an effort to establish the true picture. It reveals - through the letters as well as through the detailed mathematical and historical commentary accompanying them - Sylvester the friend, man of principle, mathematician, poet, professor, scientific activist, social observer, traveller. It also provides a detailed look at Sylvester's thoughts and thought processes as it shows him acting in both personal and professional spheres over the course of his eighty-two year life. The Sylvester who emerges from this analysis - unlike the Sylvester of the folkloric caricature - offers deep insight into the development of the technical and social structures of mathematics.
Florian Cajori, The Teaching and History of Mathematics in the United States, Washington (1890), 266. ... cited in Karen H. Parshall and David E. Rowe, The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community 1876–1900: J. J. ...
For further information, see Reinhard Siegmund- Schultze, Rockefeller and the Internationalization of Mathematics between the Two World Wars, Springer Basel AG, 2001, and Karen Hunger Parshall, The New Era in American Mathematics ...
Both Thayer and later his colleague Dennis Hart Mahan visited France for training in engineering and to review the latest literature in the field. For most of the antebellum period the military academy offered a four-year curriculum ...
Two early contributions stemming from Hilbert's work in analysis came from his American students , Oliver Dimon Kellogg and Max Mason . In fact , Kellogg completed his 1902 dissertation , “ Zur Theorie der Integralgleichungen und des ...
Will W. Alexander, Slater and Jeanes Funds, 4–5. 31. Veronica Alease Davis, Hampton University, 37. 32. Staley, Norwich in the Gilded Age. 33. Rubin, Teach the Freeman, 1:xix. 34. “Rev. L. W. Bacon Questioned.” 35.
This 1904 book forms the first in four volumes of James Joseph Sylvester's mathematical papers, covering 1837 to 1853.
The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (DSB) is a major addition to the magisterial compilation of scientific biographies edited by Charles Gillispie and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons between 1970...
Comprehensive and elegantly composed, this biography makes clear the scope of Arthur Cayley's prodigious achievements, firmly enshrining him as the "Mathematician Laureate of the Victorian Age."
Over a twelve-year period a distinguished supervisory committee from the University of Oxford, with a grant from the British Academy, has coordinated the work of 10,000 specialists worldwide to recreate...