Book cover placeholder

Copyright

Karen Attar; Adrian Rice; Christopher Stray. Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-326-3
Hardback978-1-80511-327-0
PDF978-1-80511-328-7
HTML978-1-80511-330-0
EPUB978-1-80511-329-4

Language

  • English

THEMA

  • PBX
  • DNBT
  • JNB

BISAC

  • MAT015000
  • HIS015060
  • BIO019000
  • BIO015000

Keywords

  • Augustus De Morgan
  • Biography
  • Victorian England
  • History of Mathematics
  • Mathematics Education
  • Logic

    Augustus De Morgan, Polymath

    New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy

    FORTHCOMING
    When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.

    This edited collection celebrates De Morgan as a polymath. Drawing together multiple elements of his activity from a range of publications and archives, its contributors re-assess his academic work, his place in his intellectual environment, and his legacy. The result offers new insight into De Morgan himself as well as the wider circles in which he moved, including his family life.

    Endorsements

    This very enjoyable book shines a bright and scholarly light on many facets of De Morgan’s interesting and colourful life, both academic and personal.  As the author of more than 2,200 publications, the owner of just under 4,000 books, and the writer of countless letters and manuscripts, De Morgan is not an easy man to pin down.  The editors are to be congratulated for assembling such a diverse, yet integrated, set of essays which not only capture the essence of one of 19th century British mathematics’ most remarkable characters but also provide a comprehensive finding aid to the wealth of De Morgan’s papers and publications.

    Prof June Barrow-Green

    The Open University

    Contributors

    Karen Attar

    (author)
    Curator of Rare Books and University Art at Senate House Library at University of London
    https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0898-808X

    Karen Attar is the Curator of Rare Books and University Art at Senate House Library, University of London, and was for many years a Research Fellow at the University’s Institute of English Studies. Her publications cover various aspects of book collecting, library history and librarianship. They include several book chapters on Augustus De Morgan’s library, which she also reconstituted within the University of London and catalogued. She is best known for the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (3rd edn, 2016).

    Adrian Rice

    (author)
    Dorothy and Muscoe Garnett Professor of Mathematics at Randolph–Macon College

    Adrian Rice is the Dorothy and Muscoe Garnett Professor of Mathematics at Randolph-Macon College, Virginia, USA. He has held visiting positions at the University of Virginia (1998-99) and the University of Oxford (2014-15). His research focuses on the history of mathematics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the work of Augustus De Morgan. Previous books include Mathematics in Victorian Britain, co-edited with Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, co-authored with Christopher Hollings and Ursula Martin (Bodleian Library, 2018).

    Christopher Stray

    (author)
    Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History, Heritage and Classics at Swansea University
    https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4270-8018

    Christopher Stray is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History, Heritage and Classics at Swansea University. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2012), Beinecke Library, Yale University (2005), and a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge (1996-98). His principal research interests are the history of classical scholarship and teaching, particularly at the university level; his essay collection Classics in Britain, 1800-2000 was published by Clarendon Press in 2018. He has recently contributed to collaborative projects on William Whewell, Robert Leslie Ellis and Charles Babbage, and his edition of J.M.F. Wright’s 1827 undergraduate memoir Alma Mater; or, Seven Years at the University of Cambridge appeared with University of Exeter Press in 2023.