Change and Variations

Jeremy Gray is an Emeritus Professor at the Open University and an Honorary Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. He is an Inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and for his work in the history of mathematics he was a recipient in 2009 of the AMS’s Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize, and in 2016 of the Otto Neugebauer Prize of the European Mathematical Society. He is the author or co-author of 13 books on the subject, including Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (2008), Henri Poincaré: a scientific biography (2012), and three books on the history of algebra, analysis, and geometry on the 19th century.

“This book is a very good example of a text for a course in the history of mathematics. … the author provides for students and readers a historical overview of how mathematics, physics, celestial mechanics and difficult problems to tackle from differential equations as well as applications were intertwined, and the resulting dialogues between mathematicians, physicists and astronomers. This book is a successful attempt to fill in some of the gaps on the history of differential equations.” (‪Clara Silvia Roero, Mathematical Reviews, September, 2022)

• 1 The First Ordinary Differential Equations.- 2 Variational Problems and the Calculus.- 3 The Partial Differential Calculus.- 4 Rational Mechanics.- 5 Partial Differential Equations.- 6 Lagrange's General Theory.- 7 The Calculus of Variations.- 8 Monge and Solutions to Partial Differential Equations.- 9 Revision.- 10 The Heat Equation.- 11 Gauss and the Hypergeometric Equation.- 12 Existence Theorem.- 13 Riemann and Complex Function Theory.- 14 Riemann and the Hypergeometric Equation.- 15 Schwarz and the Complex Hypergeometric Equation.- 16 Complex Ordinary Differential Equations: Poincaré.- 17 More General Partial Differential Equations.- 18 Green's Functions and Dirichlet's Principle.- 19 Attempts on Laplace's Equation.- 20 Applied Wave Equations.- 21 Revision.- 22 Riemann's Shock Wave Paper.- 23 The Example of Minimal Surfaces.- 24 Partial Differential Equations and Mechanics.- 25 Geometrical Interpretations of Mechanics.- 26 The Calculus of Variations in the 19th Century.- 27 Poincaré and Mathematical Physics.- 28 Elliptic Equations and Regular Variational Problems.- 29 Hyperbolic Equations.- 30 Revision.- 32 Translations.- A Newton's Principia Mathematica.- B Characteristics.- C First-order Non-linear Equations.- D Green's Theorem and Heat Conduction.- E Complex Analysis.- F Möbius Transformations.- G Lipschitz and Picard.- H The Assessment.- Bibliography.- Index.