Carl Benjamin Boyer

Short description: American mathematician and historian

Carl Benjamin Boyer

Born|

Hellertown, Pennsylvania, U.S.[1]

Died| April 26, 1976(1976-04-26) (aged 69)

New York City , New York, U.S.

Nationality| United States
Occupation| Historian of mathematics

Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history".[2] It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."[3]

## Life and career

Boyer was valedictorian of his high school class. He received a B.A. from Columbia College in 1928 and an M.A. in 1929. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University in 1939.[1] He was a full professor of Mathematics at the City University of New York's Brooklyn College from 1952 until his death, although he had begun tutoring and teaching at Brooklyn College in 1928.[1]

Along with Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's Hunter College; C. Doris Hellman of the Pratt Institute, and later CUNY'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.[4]

In 1954, Boyer was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his work in the history of science. In particular, the grant made reference to "the history of the theory of the rainbow".[5]

Boyer wrote the books The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959),[6] originally published as The Concepts of the Calculus (1939),[7] History of Analytic Geometry (1956),[8] The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959),[9] and A History of Mathematics (1968).[10] He served as book-review editor of Scripta Mathematica.[11]

Boyer died of a heart attack in New York City in 1976.

In 1978, Boyer's widow, the former Marjorie Duncan Nice, a professor of history,[12] established the Carl B. Boyer Memorial Prize, to be awarded annually to a Columbia University undergraduate for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic.[13]

## References

Notes

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Dauben, Joseph Warren and Scriba, Christoph J. (2002) Writing the history of mathematics: its historical development, Birkhäuser. Cf. pp.380-381 for the biography of Boyer.
2. ↑ Wallace, David Foster. "An excerpt from Everything and More". http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/wallace.htm.
3. ↑ Gray, Jeremy (2016) "Histories of Modern Mathematics in English in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s" in Remmert, Volker R.; Schneider, Martina; and Kragh Sørensen, Henrik (eds.) Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th Centuries Birkhäuser. p.161. ISBN 9783319396491
4. ↑ Gleason, Mary Louise (1999) "The Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society", Isis, Vol. 90, Supplement: Catching up with the Vision: Essays on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the History of Science Society, pp. S200-S218. University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
5. ↑ Staff (May 3, 1954) "Guggenheim Fund Grants $1,000,000" The New York Times
6. ↑ WorldCat.org OCLC=916224186
7. ↑ Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=8312338
8. ↑ Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=7462342
9. ↑ Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=3111320
10. ↑ Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=3121041
11. ↑ Scripta Mathematica. 1950. https://books.google.com/?id=zeQSAAAAIAAJ&q="Carl+B.+Boyer"&dq="Carl+B.+Boyer". Retrieved 2007-10-21.
12. ↑ Unknown (March 21, 2010) "Marjorie Boyer" (paid obituary), The New York Times
13. ↑ "Columbia College Bulletin:Prizes and Fellowships". http://www.college.columbia.edu/bulletin/prizes.php.

Further reading

* Boyer, Carl B. (August 30–September 6, 1950). Lecture: "The Foremost Textbook of Modern Times." International Congress of Mathematicians, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Retrieved on 2009-02-20.
* Boyer, Carl B. (1949). The history of the calculus and its conceptual development Hafner Publishing Company, New York, ed. Dover 1959. Retrieved on 2010-03-30.

## External links

* {{Find a Grave}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.

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