Vita Mathematica: Historical Research and Integration with Teaching

Vita Mathematica will enable teachers to learn the relevant history of various topics in the undergraduate curriculum and help them incorporate this history in their teaching. It contains articles dealing not only with calculus, but also with algebra, combinatorics, graph theory, and geometry, as well as more general articles on teaching courses for prospective teachers, and describes courses taught entirely using original sources. Judith Grabiner shows us how two important eighteenth century mathematicians, Colin Maclaurin and Joseph-Louis Lagrange, understood the calculus from these different standpoints and how their legacy is still important in teaching calculus today. We learn from Hans Nils Jahnke why Lagrange’s algebraic approach dominated teaching in Germany in the nineteenth century. Wilbur Knorr traces the ancient history of one of the possible foundations, the concept of indivisibles. This volume demonstrates that the history of mathematics is no longer tangential to the mathematics curriculum, but in fact deserves a central role.