Carl Benjamin Boyer

Carl Benjamin Boyer
Born(1906-11-03)November 3, 1906
Hellertown, Pennsylvania,
United States
DiedApril 26, 1976(1976-04-26) (aged 69)
Brooklyn, New York
Known forBooks on the history of mathematics
Academic background
Alma materColumbia University
Academic work
DisciplineHistory of mathematics
InstitutionsBrooklyn College

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 

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]

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Carl Boyer dies, a mathematician". The New York Times. April 27, 1976. p. 37. Archived from the original on November 16, 2022. Retrieved March 20, 2026.
  2. ^ Wallace, David Foster. "An excerpt from Everything and More". Archived from the original on 2012-02-19. Retrieved 2007-08-28.
  3. ^ Remmert, Volker R.; Schneider, Martina R.; Sørensen, Henrik Kragh (2016-12-08). Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Birkhäuser. ISBN 978-3-319-39649-1.
  4. ^ Dauben, Joseph W.; Scriba, Christoph J., eds. (2002). Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development. Birkhäuser. ISBN 978-3-764-36167-9.
  5. ^ 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
  6. ^ Staff (May 3, 1954) "Guggenheim Fund Grants $1,000,000" The New York Times
  7. ^ Boyer, Carl B. (2012) [1959]. The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development. New York: Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-60509-8.
  8. ^ Boyer, Carl B. (1949). The Concepts of the Calculus. New York: Hafner Pub. Co. OCLC 1425849052.
  9. ^ Boyer, Carl B. (1956). History of Analytic Geometry. New York: Scripta Mathematica. OCLC 260863.
  10. ^ Boyer, Carl B. (1959). The Rainbow from Myth to Mathematics. New York: T. Yoseloff. OCLC 538512.
  11. ^ a b Acker, Kathleen (July 2007). "Review: A History of Mathematics". Convergence. Mathematical Association of America.
  12. ^ Boyer, Carl B.; Merzbach, Uta (2011). A History of Mathematics (3rd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-52548-7.
  13. ^ a b c d Graham, Jason M. (April 17, 2017). "A History of Mathematics". MAA Reviews. Mathematical Association of America.
  14. ^ Scripta Mathematica. 1950. Retrieved 2007-10-21.
  15. ^ "Columbia College Bulletin:Prizes and Fellowships". Archived from the original on 2002-10-01. Retrieved 2009-02-20.

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 February 20, 2009.
  • Kline, Morris (1972). Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press.
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