François Viète, the innovative algebraist and cryptanalyst, was deeply involved in the political machinations of his time. We examine his only extant poem, a scurrilous polemic supporting Henri IV’s struggle to ascend the French throne against the opposition of the clergy of Paris. Writing in the voice of those clerics, Viète produced a sly political satire he may have intended as a kind of steganography, inserting a covert message to undermine the king’s enemies within a surface text that seems to argue the exact opposite. Though this poem appeared in an anonymous pamphlet at the time, recognizing Viète’s authorship shows another side of his political activity.

In 1696, Juan Ramón Koenig, the Chief Cosmographer of the Viceroyalty of Peru and professor of mathematics at San Marcos University in Lima, published a book titled Cubus et sphaera geometrice duplicata in which he claims to solve the classical problem of doubling the cube by compass and straightedge only. His idea was to start from the neusis solution of this problem given by Nicodemes and somehow transform it into a compass and straightedge construction. We know today that the cube root of 2 is not a constructible number, thus his solution has to be faulty. Since so far nobody has analyzed Koenig’s work in detail, we undertake this task using modern mathematical notation and methods. By scrutinizing his construction step by step, we reveal where he has failed.

Russia was devastated by the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution that started in 1917. As a result, many people, particularly members of the intelligentsia, were forced to flee their country, prompting waves of migration. They were reasonably safe in some European countries and the USA, and the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was one such destination. Here I discuss the case of two Russian mathematicians, Anton Bilimovich (1879–1970) and Nikolay Saltykov (1872–1961), who were established figures within the Russian scientific community, but upon arrival in Belgrade their status shifted immediately to that of refugees. Nevertheless, they promptly continued their scientific careers as integrated members of Yugoslav society, ultimately reaching the ranks of academicians of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the highest academic distinction in Serbia to this day. Their lives in Yugoslavia were characterized by new beginnings and continuing with mathematical practices. I also argue that their arrival in Belgrade was mutually beneficial for them and for the state, since their contributions to the development of Yugoslav mathematics were substantial at a time when the country was struggling to establish its national identity.

This study investigates a course that integrates the history of mathematics with technology, encouraging it with exemplary practices and supporting it with an expanding knowledge network. The course aimed to expand the knowledge of gifted students about the history of mathematics with the help of digital resources and to integrate the history of mathematics into mathematics lessons. The method of the research is qualitative, using a case study design. The results of the analysis show that the data obtained by content analysis are as follows: in general, students stated that the history of mathematics and the applied activities made both cognitive and affective contributions to the mathematics learning process. These results exemplify the potential of integrating the history of mathematics into mathematics lessons through digital activities to lead to significant improvements in both knowledge acquisition and student motivation.

Leonardo da Vinci used translation, rotation, cutting and other elementary geometric transformations, transforming curved edge graphics into straight edge graphics, forming hundreds of pages of scattered but highly aesthetic ‘De ludo geometrico’ (Geometrical Game) manuscripts. The content includes the definition of curved edges, such as crescent, falcate, circular segment, and leaf shape, and the mutual conversion of the areas of various figures. Use proportional relationships to explore the product of curved edge shapes methods, and the interconversion of shapes’ areas. The ideas of movement and transformation, transformation thought, proportion and drawing method embodied in it have certain enlightenment and reference to the mathematics education in primary and secondary schools today.

In 1933 Brenda Stoessiger, a statistician specializing in craniometry, and Roy Clapham, a botanist interested in statistics, married. Marriages between established scientists were rare in England then and, in statistics, unknown. The couple’s statistical mentors were the implacably opposed Karl Peason and Ronald Fisher. This paper describes the lives of Stoessiger and Clapham, emphasizing the less well-known Stoessiger. Her activity in craniometry and statistics was representative of its place and time – England, the 1920s through the 40s – as were the opportunities she found and the constraints she faced as a woman, specifically a married woman.

Pedal curves are a type of curve that were studied systematically by Colin Maclaurin in 1720, after which they were no longer studied, although they were still used by a few mathematicians. They returned to the forefront at the end of the 1840s in intermediate mathematical journals such as the Nouvelles annales de mathématiques. This article is therefore devoted to the study of these curves by Maclaurin and then in the Nouvelles annales de mathématiques, which, like the intermediate mathematical journals, are the place where pedal curves became a heritage mathematical object. We will also study the population that made these curves part of mathematical heritage and we will see how Maclaurin is considered as the father of pedal curves during the second half of the nineteenth century.