Cultural History of Mathematics in the Medieval Age

Clemency Montelle is Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. She has research interests in the mathematical history of several early cultures of inquiry including Mesopotamia, Greece, India, and the Islamic near east. She is the co-author of several books on early mathematical astronomy, including Editing and Analysing Numerical Tables Towards a Digital Information System for the History of Astral Sciences (Brepols, 2021) along with editors Benno van Dalen and Matthieu Husson, The Sanskrit Astronomical Table Text Brahmatulyasara?i Numerical Tables in Textual Scholarship (Brill, 2021) with Anuj Misra and Kim Plofker, Sanskrit Astronomical Tables (Springer, 2019) with Kim Plofker, and Chasing Shadows: Mathematics, Astronomy, and the Early History of Eclipse Reckoning (2011).Joseph W. Dauben is Distinguished Professor of History and History of Science at the City University of New York. He is the author of Georg Cantor, His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite and Abraham Robinson: The Creation of Nonstandard Analysis, a Personal and Mathematical Odyssey. A graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D. '72), he has been editor of Historia Mathematica and a former chairman of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics. Professor Dauben has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), is a Life Member of Clare Hall (Cambridge), an honorary member of the Institute for History of Natural Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and recipient of the American Mathematical Society’s Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize for History of Mathematics.Kim Plofker is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She received her doctorate from the Department of the History of Mathematics at Brown University in 1995. Her research focuses on the history of mathematics and astronomy in India and its connections with Islamic and early modern European science. Professor Plofker’s books include Mathematics in India (Princeton, 2009) and (with Anuj Misra and Clemency Montelle) The Sanskrit Astronomical Table Text Brahmatulyasarini (Brill, 2021). She delivered a Plenary Lecture at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India, and was awarded the Brouwer Medal of the Royal Mathematical Society of the Netherlands in 2011.

“How was mathematics understood and written in the medieval age? How was it practised and used? These questions and many more are answered in this wonderful tour of the mathematics of the medieval age.”

• Edited by Joseph W. Dauben, CUNY, USA, Clemency Montelle, University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Kim Plofker, Union College, USAIntroduction, Joseph W. Dauben, Clemency Montelle, and Kim Plofker1. Everyday Numeracy, Joseph W. Dauben, Clemency Montelle and Kim Plofker2. Practice and Profession, Clemency Montelle3. Inventing Mathematics, Kim Plofker4. Mathematics and Worldviews, Joseph W. Dauben5. Describing and Understanding the World, Jeff Chen6. Mathematics and Technological Change, Joseph W. Dauben, Clemency Montelle and Kim Plofker7. Representing Mathematics, Sonja Brentjes and Nathan SidoliNotesBibliographyIndex