To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the geometry chair, a meeting was held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the talks presented at this meeting have formed the basis for this fully edited and lavishly illustrated book, which outlines the first 400 years of Oxford's Savilian Professors of Geometry.

This is the story of the intellectual and social life of a community, and of its interactions with the wider world. For 800 years mathematics has been researched and studied at Oxford, and the subject and its teaching have undergone profound changes during that time. This highly readable and beautifully illustrated book reveals the richness and influence of Oxford's mathematical tradition and the fascinating characters who helped to shape it. The story begins with the founding of the university of Oxford and the establishing of the medieval curriculum, in which mathematics had an important role. The Black Death, the advent of printing, the founding of the university of Cambridge, and the Newtonian revolution all had a great influence on the later development of mathematics at Oxford. So too did many well-known figures: Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Edmond Halley, Benjamin Jowett, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, G. H. Hardy, to name but a few. Later chapters bring us to the twentieth century, and the book ends with some entertaining reminiscences by Sir Michael Atiyah of the thirty years he spent as an Oxford mathematician.

John Wallis (1616-1703) was the most influential English mathematician prior to Newton. He published his most famous work, Arithmetica Infinitorum, in Latin in 1656. This book studied the quadrature of curves and systematised the analysis of Descartes and Cavelieri. Upon publication, this text immediately became the standard book on the subject and was frequently referred to by subsequent writers. This will be the first English translation of this text ever to be published.

During the Victorian era, industrial and economic growth led to a phenomenal rise in productivity and invention. That spirit of creativity and ingenuity was reflected in the massive expansion in scope and complexity of many scientific disciplines during this time, with subjects evolving rapidly and the creation of many new disciplines. The subject of mathematics was no exception and many of the advances made by mathematicians during the Victorian period are still familiar today; matrices, vectors, Boolean algebra, histograms, and standard deviation were just some of the innovations pioneered by these mathematicians. This book constitutes perhaps the first general survey of the mathematics of the Victorian period. It assembles in a single source research on the history of Victorian mathematics that would otherwise be out of the reach of the general reader. It charts the growth and institutional development of mathematics as a profession through the course of the 19th century in England, Scotland, Ireland, and across the British Empire. It then focuses on developments in specific mathematical areas, with chapters ranging from developments in pure mathematical topics (such as geometry, algebra, and logic) to Victorian work in the applied side of the subject (including statistics, calculating machines, and astronomy). Along the way, we encounter a host of mathematical scholars, some very well known (such as Charles Babbage, James Clerk Maxwell, Florence Nightingale, and Lewis Carroll), others largely forgotten, but who all contributed to the development of Victorian mathematics.

G. H. Hardy ranks among the greatest twentieth-century mathematicians. This book introduces this extraordinary individual and his writing.

Established in the early seventeenth century following a bequest to the university by Sir William Sedley, Oxford's Sedleian Professorship of Natural Philosophy is one of the university's oldest professorships. In common with other such positions established around this time, such as the Savilian Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy, for example, its purpose was to provide centrally organised lectures on a specific subject. While the Professorship is now a high-profile research post in applied mathematics, it has previously been held by physicians, an astronomer, and several people in the eighteenth century whose credentials in natural philosophy are much less clear. This edited volume traces the varied history of the chair through the first four centuries of its existence, combining specialised contributions from historians of medicine, of science, of mathematics, and of universities, together with personal reminiscences of some of the more recent holders of the post.