Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics

This volume contains 8 papers that have been collected by the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics. It showcases rigorously reviewed contemporary scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

Some of the topics explored include:

• The work of Alfred Clebsch and Adolph Mayer on the theory of the second variation, a topic in the calculus of variations
• The history of The Analyst - the journal that would eventually become the Annals of Mathematics - and its founding editor, Joel Hendricks
• An examination of early attempts at introducing transformations into the geometry curriculum at the secondary level
• Anna Sfard's commognitive theory of learning and how it can be applied to gain insights into certain aspects of the history of mathematics
• Analyzing archaeological data from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the kinship system of the Natchez tribe of the Mississippi Valley as examples of utilizing ethnomathematics in mathematics education

Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible not only to mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also to anyone with a general interest in mathematics.

Craig Fraser, The Clebsch-Mayer Theory of the Second Variation in the Calculus of Variations: A Case Study in the Influence of Dynamical Analysis on Pure Mathematics. - Roger Godard, La merveilleuse équation de Laplace. - James Tattersall, Shawn McMurran, Joel Hendricks and
The Analyst
. - Duncan Melville, Arithmetic in Sum: Style and Audience in Eighteenth-Century Arithmetic Texts. - Christopher Baltus, Figures in Motion: Geometric Transformations in Secondary School Mathematics, 1874-1906. - Janet Heine Barnett, Mathematics as Discourse: A Commognitive View of Late 19th-Century Algebra. - Ximena Catepillán and Cynthia Huffman, Two Examples of Ethnomathematics: The Intersection of Culture, History, and Mathematics.