"Burdick's exhaustive research has unearthed numerous examples of books not previously cataloged as mathematical. While it was thought that no mathematical writings in English were printed in the Americas before 1703, Burdick gives scholars one of their first chances to discover Jacob Taylor's 1697 Tenebrae, a treatise on solving triangles and other figures using basic trigonometry. He also goes beyond the English language to discuss works in Spanish and Latin, such as Alonso de la Vera Cruz's 1554 logic text, the Recognitio Summularum; a book on astrology by Enrico Martinez; books on the nature of comets by Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora and Eusebio Francisco Kino; and a 1676 almanac by Feliciana Ruiz, the first woman to produce a mathematical work in the Americas.".

This is the first truly comprehensive and thorough history of the development of mathematics and a mathematical community in the United States and Canada. This first volume of the multi-volume work takes the reader from the European encounters with North America in the fifteenth century up to the emergence of a research community the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth. In the story of the colonial period, particular emphasis is given to several prominent colonial figures—Jefferson, Franklin, and Rittenhouse—and four important early colleges—Harvard, Québec, William & Mary, and Yale. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, mathematics in North America was largely the occupation of scattered individual pioneers: Bowditch, Farrar, Adrain, B. Peirce. This period is given a fuller treatment here than previously in the literature, including the creation of the first PhD programs and attempts to form organizations and found journals. With the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876 the American mathematical research community was finally, and firmly, founded. The programs at Hopkins, Chicago, and Clark are detailed as are the influence of major European mathematicians including especially Klein, Hilbert, and Sylvester. Klein's visit to the US and his Evanston Colloquium are extensively detailed. The founding of the American Mathematical Society is thoroughly discussed. David Zitarelli was emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Temple University. A decorated and acclaimed teacher, scholar, and expositor, he was one of the world's leading experts on the development of American mathematics. Author or co-author of over a dozen books, this was his magnum opus—sure to become the leading reference on the topic and essential reading, not just for historians. In clear and compelling prose Zitarelli spins a tale accessible to experts, generalists, and anyone interested in the history of science in North America.

This book is a reference for librarians, mathematicians, and statisticians involved in college and research level mathematics and statistics in the 21st century. We are in a time of transition in scholarly communications in mathematics, practices which have changed little for a hundred years are giving way to new modes of accessing information. Where journals, books, indexes and catalogs were once the physical representation of a good mathematics library, shelves have given way to computers, and users are often accessing information from remote places. Part I is a historical survey of the past 15 years tracking this huge transition in scholarly communications in mathematics. Part II of the book is the bibliography of resources recommended to support the disciplines of mathematics and statistics. These are grouped by type of material. Publication dates range from the 1800's onwards. Hundreds of electronic resources-some online, both dynamic and static, some in fixed media, are listed among the paper resources. Amazingly a majority of listed electronic resources are free.

This is the first truly comprehensive and thorough history of the development of mathematics and a mathematical community in the United States and Canada. This first volume of the multi-volume work takes the reader from the European encounters with North America in the fifteenth century up to the emergence of a research community the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth. In the story of the colonial period, particular emphasis is given to several prominent colonial figures—Jefferson, Franklin, and Rittenhouse—and four important early colleges—Harvard, Québec, William & Mary, and Yale. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, mathematics in North America was largely the occupation of scattered individual pioneers: Bowditch, Farrar, Adrain, B. Peirce. This period is given a fuller treatment here than previously in the literature, including the creation of the first PhD programs and attempts to form organizations and found journals. With the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876 the American mathematical research community was finally, and firmly, founded. The programs at Hopkins, Chicago, and Clark are detailed as are the influence of major European mathematicians including especially Klein, Hilbert, and Sylvester. Klein's visit to the US and his Evanston Colloquium are extensively detailed. The founding of the American Mathematical Society is thoroughly discussed. David Zitarelli was emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Temple University. A decorated and acclaimed teacher, scholar, and expositor, he was one of the world's leading experts on the development of American mathematics. Author or co-author of over a dozen books, this was his magnum opus—sure to become the leading reference on the topic and essential reading, not just for historians. In clear and compelling prose Zitarelli spins a tale accessible to experts, generalists, and anyone interested in the history of science in North America.

This book presents a history of mathematic between 1607 and 1865 in that part of mainland North America which is north of Mexico but excludes the present-day Canada and Alaska. Unlike most other histories of mathematics now available, the emphasis is on the gradual emergence of "mathematics for all" programs and associated changes in thinking which drove this emergence. The book takes account of changing ideas about intended, implemented and attained mathematics curricula for learners of all ages. It also pays attention to the mathematics itself, and to how it was taught and learned.

This well-illustrated book, by two established historians of school mathematics, documents Thomas Jefferson’s quest, after 1775, to introduce a form of decimal currency to the fledgling United States of America. The book describes a remarkable study showing how the United States’ decision to adopt a fully decimalized, carefully conceived national currency ultimately had a profound effect on U.S. school mathematics curricula. The book shows, by analyzing a large set of arithmetic textbooks and an even larger set of handwritten cyphering books, that although most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors of arithmetic textbooks included sections on vulgar and decimal fractions, most school students who prepared cyphering books did not study either vulgar or decimal fractions. In other words, author-intended school arithmetic curricula were not matched by teacher-implemented school arithmetic curricula. Amazingly, that state of affairs continued even after the U.S. Mint began minting dollars, cents and dimes in the 1790s. In U.S. schools between 1775 and 1810 it was often the case that Federal money was studied but decimal fractions were not. That gradually changed during the first century of the formal existence of the United States of America. By contrast, Chapter 6 reports a comparative analysis of data showing that in Great Britain only a minority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century school students studied decimal fractions. Clements and Ellerton argue that Jefferson’s success in establishing a system of decimalized Federal money had educationally significant effects on implemented school arithmetic curricula in the United States of America. The lens through which Clements and Ellerton have analyzed their large data sets has been the lag-time theoretical position which they have developed. That theory posits that the time between when an important mathematical “discovery” is made (or a concept is “created”) and when that discovery (or concept) becomes an important part of school mathematics is dependent on mathematical, social, political and economic factors. Thus, lag time varies from region to region, and from nation to nation. Clements and Ellerton are the first to identify the years after 1775 as the dawn of a new day in U.S. school mathematics—traditionally, historians have argued that nothing in U.S. school mathematics was worthy of serious study until the 1820s. This book emphasizes the importance of the acceptance of decimal currency so far as school mathematics is concerned. It also draws attention to the consequences for school mathematics of the conscious decision of the U.S. Congress not to proceed with Thomas Jefferson’s grand scheme for a system of decimalized weights and measures.

A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf represents a significant contribution to the study of the intellectual life of women in British North America. Kevin J. Hayes studies the books these women read and the reasons why they read them. As Hayes notes, recent studies on the literary tastes of early American women have concentrated on the post-revolutionary period, when several women novelists emerged. Yet, he observes, women were reading long before they began writing and publishing novels, and, in fact, mounting evidence now suggests that literacy rates among colonial women were much higher than previously supposed. To reconstruct what might have filled a typical colonial woman’s bookshelf, Hayes has mined such sources as wills and estate inventories, surviving volumes inscribed by women, public and private library catalogs, sales ledgers, borrowing records from subscription libraries, and contemporary biographical sketches of notable colonial women. Hayes identifies several categories of reading material. These range from devotional works and conduct books to midwifery guides and cookery books, from novels and travel books to science books. In his concluding chapter, he describes the tensions that were developing near the end of the colonial period between the emerging cult of domesticity and the appetite for learning many women displayed. With its meticulous research and rich detail, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complexities of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America.

As an historiographic monograph, this book offers a detailed survey of the professional evolution and significance of an entire discipline devoted to the history of science. It provides both an intellectual and a social history of the development of the subject from the first such effort written by the ancient Greek author Eudemus in the Fourth Century BC, to the founding of the international journal, Historia Mathematica, by Kenneth O. May in the early 1970s.