Carl Benjamin Boyer
American mathematician and historian (1906–1976)
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Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was an American historian of mathematics,[1] dubbed the "Gibbon of math history" by novelist David Foster Wallace.[2] He was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."[3]: 161
United States
Carl Benjamin Boyer | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | November 3, 1906 Hellertown, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | April 26, 1976 (aged 69) Brooklyn, New York |
| Known for | Books on the history of mathematics |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History of mathematics |
| Institutions | Brooklyn College |
Early life and education
Boyer was born in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, on November 3, 1906, and graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. He received a bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1928 and started working as a tutor at Brooklyn College in the same year. From Columbia University, he earned his master's degree in 1929 and his doctorate in history in 1939.[1] He was a full professor of mathematics at Brooklyn College from 1952 until his death.[4]: 380–1
Career
Along with Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's Hunter College; C. Doris Hellman of the Pratt Institute, and later City University of New York's Queens College; and Lynn Thorndike of Columbia University, Boyer was instrumental in the 1953 founding of the Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society.[5]
In 1954, Boyer was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his work in the history of science, in particular, the history of the study of rainbows.[6]
Boyer wrote the books The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959), with a foreword was written by Richard Courant,[7] which was originally published as The Concepts of the Calculus (1939);[8] History of Analytic Geometry (1956);[9] and The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959).[10]
Boyer published A History of Mathematics in 1968. After he died in 1976, Uta Merzbach, a historian of mathematics at the Smithsonian Institution took responsibility for revising and updating the text, completing the second edition in 1991, with a foreword by Isaac Asimov.[11] She released the third edition in 2011.[12][13] Reviewers praised this book for its broad and accessible coverage of interesting developments from antiquity to the modern era.[11][13] However, the third edition contains no exercises at the end of each chapter.[13] Jason Graham noted that readers interested in more technical details could supplement the book with A History of Mathematics (2009) by Victor Katz or The Fontana History of the Mathematical Sciences (1997) by Ivor Grattan-Guinness.[13]
In 1965, Boyer was appointed associate editor of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, which was being planned by the American Council of Learned Societies.[1] He also served as book-review editor of Scripta Mathematica, published by Yeshiva University.[14]
Personal life and death
He was married to Marjorie Boyer (née Nice), a professor of history. Boyer died of a heart attack at his home Brooklyn, New York, on April 26, 1976. He was 69 years old.[1]
In 1978, Boyer's widow established the Carl B. Boyer Memorial Prize, to be awarded annually to an undergraduate at Columbia University who was not an American citizen for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic.[15]
