"Lecture" for Week 11
All I have to say this week is to summarize two fascinating biographical
articles in the Monthly.
Since we have a short reading assignment this week, maybe you can find
time to read the articles.
Both of them are old enough to be accessible online through the TAMU
library. (To my consternation, articles in the MAA journals more recent
than 2002 do not seem to be available. Apparently we dropped a
subscription.)
Galois
T. Rothman, "Genius and biographers: The fictionalization of Evariste
Galois",
Amer. Math. Monthly 89, 84-106 (1982).
This article
reinforces my initial warning not to believe everything you read about the
history of mathematics, especially when written by nonprofessional
historians.
In particular, the statement that Galois "hurriedly [wrote] out his
discoveries
on group theory" the night before his duel is an exaggeration.
(He had been writing manuscripts for several years and trying to get them
published, but for a combination of
reasons they had not been published. What he did that night was to write
a summary
in a letter to a friend and also to go through the manuscripts and
annotate them.
At least that's what Rothman -- who is not a professional historian either
-- says.)
Bell
Rothman is especially hard on the author Eric Temple Bell.
Bell's books on mathematics and mathematicians were immensely
popular around the middle of the 20th century;
I read several when I was in high school. Today they are out of
favor, being regarded as inaccurate and antifeminist (although I
think no more sexist than most books about math history from that
period and earlier). That's why they are not listed in any Math. 629
web pages, although more than one of them
would qualify as math history books on the basis of content.
It turns out that Bell himself was a strange character
(he had some private demons, as they say). There is an article
about him by Constance Reid, Am. Math. Monthly 108,
393-402 (2001).