Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics

This volume contains fourteen papers that were presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/La Société Canadienne d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Mathématiques, held at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.  

In addition to showcasing rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics, this meeting also honored the life and work of the logician and philosopher of mathematics Aldo Antonelli (1962-2015).  The first four papers in this book are part of that remembrance and have a philosophical focus. Included in these are a discussion of Bolzano’s objections to Kant’s philosophy of mathematics and an examination of the influence of rhetorical and poetic aesthetics on the development of symbols in the 16th and 17th Centuries.  The remaining papers deal with the history of mathematics and cover such subjects as 

Early schemes for polar ordinates in the work of L’Hôpital, based on lessons given to him by Bernoulli

A method devised by Euler for determining if a number is a sum of two squares

Playfair’s Axiom and what it reveals about the history of 19th-Century mathematics education

The modern library classification system for mathematical subjects

An exploration of various examples of sundials throughout Paris





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