Chair Of Mathematics Research Articles

Franciszek Leja (1885–1979) i jego wspomnienia Dawniej było inaczej

Franciszek Leja (1885–1979) and His Memoirs Dawniej było inaczej (‘It Was Different in the Past’) The article aims to present previously unpublished memoirs of mathematician Franciszek Leja, spanning the years 1885–1958 – from his birth to his participation in the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh. Leja recalls the childhood of a peasant son struggling with poverty, his education at the folk school in Grodzisk and the public school in Leżajsk. Then he describes his studies at a gymnasium in Jarosław and at the University of Lviv (Lwów). He recalls the difficult path to obtaining a doctorate and habilitation at a time when he had to balance his scientific studies with work in Galician junior high schools (1910–1924) and briefly describes his scholarship in France and England (1912/1913, scholarship from the Kretkowski Fund). The penultimate section consists of Leja’s recollections from a 12-year period of work at the Warsaw University of Technology, where he was a professor of mathematics at the Faculty of Chemistry, and when he took over the chair of mathematics at the Jagiellonian University in 1936 and then from his scientific visit to France, which took place on the eve of the war. The last, unfinished chapter was devoted to his recollections of the arrest of Jagiellonian University professors on 6 November 1939, his clandestine teaching during the war, and his post-war visits abroad. The memoirs are preceded by Leja’s short biography. Numerous footnotes were added, expanding and correcting the information provided in the original text and illustrations.

Higher Mathematics Chair of the Physics Department at Novosibirsk State University

The article presents the higher mathematics chair of the physics department at Novosibirsk State University, describing the history of its creation, its traditions, and methods used by its lecturers. The reader can also find here some general information about the staff and the courses taught.

Regulars - History. Pierre Gassendi's Institutio Astronomica

Institutio Astronomica, regarded as one of the first modern astronomy textbooks, was originally published in 1647 and is based on a series of lectures that Pierre Gassendi gave when he was the chair of mathematics at College Royal in Paris.

The Edinburgh Mathematical Laboratory and Edmund Taylor Whittaker's role in the early development of numerical analysis in Britain

In 1912, Edmund Taylor Whittaker (1873–1956) was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. The following year he opened the Edinburgh Mathematical Laboratory. The purpose of the Laboratory was practical instruction in topics which are now classed together as numerical analysis.In this article I explore the inspiration, purpose, and impact of the Laboratory in the context of early 20th century British applied mathematics.

MARIA GAETANA AGNESI, ENFANT PRODIGE, MATEMATICA, PIA NOBILDONNA

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) was a prominent figure in eighteenth-century Milan. A child prodigy, and an attraction in the scientific and philosophical disputes organized in the paternal home, she was the first woman to publish a mathematical treatise, the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (1748), a clear and systematic presentation of both Cartesian geometry and infinitesimal analysis. Among the curves studied in that work is the versiera, (witch) the cubic curve that is still associated with her name. Appointed by Pope Benedict XIV in 1750 on the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna, she did not accept that assignment. After her father’s death in 1752, she left mathematics to devote herself entirely to pious works, and to taking care of poor and infirm women in the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, where she spent the last fifteen years of life.

GeoGebra como estrategia de enseñanza de la Matemática

El objetivo estuvo centrado en describir el uso de la herramienta GeoGebra como alternativa en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la Matemática, a fin de proponer una guia para la formulación de un plan de estrategia didáctica dirigido a los docentes del área de matemática de la ciudad de Azogues. Se fundamentó desde el enfoque positivista y se desarrolló con base en la metodología cuantitativa. La población estuvo conformada por 84 docentes del área de matemática. Los resultados de la tabla 2 revelan que el 71,8% de los docentes encuestados ocasionalmente, casi nunca y/o nunca utilizan algún tipo de software educativo para impartir su cátedra de Matemática. El modelo ADDIE propuesto para la implementación del uso de GeoGebra en el aula permite al docente identificar los aspectos positivos y negativos en cada fase del ciclo metodológico, para mejorar y renovar sus actividades didacticas y así obtener una mejor participación estudiantil.

Traces in the Archive: Re-imagining Sofia Kovalevskaya

ABSTRACT In this paper, I draw on my research project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, through excavating Sofia Kovalevskaya’s auto/biographical documents. As the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe, but also as a novelist and playwright, Kovaleskaya is a figure who has inspired generations of women mathematicians, as well as feminist and literary scholars around the world. And yet, apart from her autobiography of her early years in Russia her personal writings have never been translated in their entirety and remain inaccessible to non-Russian speaking scholars. What has emerged instead from the significant body of secondary literature that has evolved around her life and work is a meta-archive of scattered auto/biographical documents with different and often competing translations, extracts from her letters, diary entries, as well as novels and plays that create palimpsests of traces of the self. In addressing questions arising from working with fragments and traces of the self, I consider the importance of creative imagination in forming entanglements between the researcher and her archival figures. In this light archival research is configured as a process, emerging after layers of documents have been assembled, reordered, transcribed, translated and effectively rewritten.

مستوى الثقافة المهنیة فی تعلیم الریاضیات المدرسیة بالمملکة العربیة السعودیة Level of Professionalism Culture in Education of School Mathematics in Saudi Arabia

هدفت الدراسة الحالية إلى الکشف عن مستوى الثقافة في تعليم الرياضيات المدرسية بالمملکة العربية السعودية. واعتمدت الدراسة على المنهج الوصفي المسحي، وشملت عينتها مختلف المناطق التعليمية في المملکة من الجنسين، وتکونت من: (45) رئيس قسم الرياضيات في الإشراف التربوي، و(85) مشرف رياضيات تربوي. واستخدمت أداتين لجمع البيانات، هي: استبانة لرئيس قسم الرياضيات في الإشراف التربوي، واستبانة لمشرف الرياضيات التربوي. وخلصت الدراسة إلى أن الثقافة لدى معلمي الرياضيات کانت بدرجة متوسطة من وجهة نظر مشرفيهم التربويين (متوسط: 1.92)، حيث ظهرت جميع أبعادها لدى معلم الرياضيات بدرجة متوسطة أيضا. وأن الثقافة لدى مشرفي الرياضيات التربويين کانت بدرجة عالية من وجهة نظر رؤسائهم في الإشراف التربوي (متوسط: 2.66)، حيث ظهرت جميع أبعادها لدى مشرف الرياضيات بدرجة عالية أيضا. کما اتصفت بيئة الرياضيات المدرسية بمهنية عالية من وجهة نظر مشرفي الرياضيات التربويين ورؤسائهم في الإشراف التربوي (متوسط: 2.35)، حيث ظهر بعدا المعتقدات المهنية، والمسؤوليات المهنية بدرجة عالية (بمتوسطي: 2.49 و2.43 على الترتيب)، بينما ظهر بعد المعارف والممارسات المهنية بدرجة متوسطة. وقدمت الدراسة عددا من التوصيات والمقترحات ذات العلاقة بنتائجها. This paper is aimed at discovering the level of professionalism culture in the education of school mathematics in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is based on a descriptive survey approach with a sample including various school districts in Saudi Arabia from both genders, which contained: (45) Chairs of the department of mathematics in educational supervision, and (85) supervisors of educational mathematics. It used two materials to collect data, a questionnaire for the chair of mathematics in educational supervision, and a survey for the supervisor of educational mathematics. The results showed that the teachers’ level of professionalism culture was considered average according to their educational supervisors (average: 1.92), which from all dimensions, appeared to be average too. While the supervisors of educational mathematics’ level of educational culture was considered high according to their chairs in educational supervision (average: 2.66), which from all dimensions, appeared to be high too. The professionalism culture in the environment of school mathematics was considered high according to supervisors of educational mathematics and their chairs in educational supervision (average: 2.35), which from the two dimensions “the professionalism beliefs, and the professionalism responsibilities”, appeared to be high (average: 2.49, and 2.43 in order), while the dimension of “professionalism knowledge and practices” appeared to be average. The paper presented a set of recommendations and suggestions relevant to its results.

Analysis of student’s final qualification theses using text loans detection systems

In this paper there are results of the bachelor and master theses citing analysis. These students graduated from the Higher mathematics chair of the Russian Technological University in the summer of 2018. In this comparative analysis the dependencies of thesis loan percent on parameters of students, statistical values of their theses are explored. This research is actual because of the progress and development of new informational technologies used in the educational system. Popularity of the text loan detection systems increases. Automatic plagiarism detection systems are intended to make educational process better, the text drawing search easier, to support the copyright laws and academical honesty. The percentage is given by two main Russian plagiarism detection systems: Antiplagiat and Rucontext. Connections between thesis parameters are explored. Advantages of each text loan detection systems are described. In this research there are the results of the pedagogical experiment aimed to analyze statistically the dependencies of the bachelor’s and master’s theses loan percentage which have been got from Antiplagiat and Rucontext systems on the author’s parameters, statistical values describing thesis text. The comparison between statistical results of these systems have been made. The conclusions about their advantages have been presented in the paper. In order to make the comparison methods of the mathematical statistics have been used. Numerical experiment has been provided by means of the packages of the R statistical language. The difference between text loan percentages in the Antiplagiat and Rucontext systems has been analyzed. It has been shown that it grows when length of the text becomes larger. The dependencies of the text loan percentage on the available parameters of the thesis author and text parameters have been presented. The dependencies types are the same for the both systems. Scale of the coefficients in the statistical dependencies is also the same. The difference is in the very set of the parameters: the Rucontext percentage is better described statistically with the sex of the author, the Antiplagiat percentage is described with the type of the higher education (bachelor’s or master’s thesis). Also the dependency of the text loan percentage on the length of the thesis text differs: the Antiplagiat percentage is better described statistically with the number of words but the Rucontext percentage is described with the number of characters. It seems that these differences can be explained with different text search and analyze algorithms. The dependencies between the Rucontext percentage and the Antiplagiat text loan percentage is presented.

The hydrostatical works of George Sinclair ( c . 1630–1696): an addendum

Further to a recent paper about the work of George Sinclair ( c . 1630–1696), new biographical information has come to light. Following one year of study at St Andrews, Sinclair obtained a Master of Arts degree at Edinburgh University in 1649. Later, after his enforced resignation as a Regent at Glasgow University in 1666, he taught mathematics at Edinburgh University, without swearing the prescribed oath of allegiance. This employment terminated in 1674 with the appointment of James Gregory to Edinburgh's first established chair of mathematics. The interest of Robert Hooke in Sinclair's hydrostatical work is also noted.

Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Editor). Duncan Liddel (1561–1613): Networks of Polymathy and the Northern European Renaissance. With Karin Friedrich. (Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 17.) xii + 322 pp., figs., bibl., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. €135 (cloth).

Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Editor). <i>Duncan Liddel (1561–1613): Networks of Polymathy and the Northern European Renaissance</i>. With Karin Friedrich. (Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 17.) xii + 322 pp., figs., bibl., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. €135 (cloth).

The Gresham Professors of Geometry Part 2: the next three hundred years

The Gresham Chair of Geometry is the oldest mathematics chair in England, and over the past four hundred years thirty-two Gresham professors have presented free lectures on mathematical topics to the general public. In this two-part article we outline the history of these appointments from the founding of Gresham College in 1596 to the present day. In particular, we mention the development of logarithms by Henry Briggs, describe how The Royal Society emerged from Gresham College in the early 1660s, and specify when the statistical terms standard deviation and histogram were first used.

The Gresham Professors of Geometry Part 1: the first one hundred years

The Gresham Chair of Geometry is the oldest mathematics chair in England, and over the past four hundred years thirty-two Gresham professors have presented free lectures on mathematical topics to the general public. In this two-part article we outline the history of these appointments from the founding of Gresham College in 1596 to the present day. In particular, we mention the development of logarithms by Henry Briggs, describe how The Royal Society emerged from Gresham College in the early 1660s, and specify when the statistical terms standard deviation and histogram were first used.

Texts and images

The gradual abandonment of Latin as the universal language of the world of learning was a long process. Felicity Henderson's ‘Faithful interpreters?’ in this issue examines a stage in the process, during the early years of the Royal Society, in which correspondents' relatively novel use of

Topology — Possibilities of application in architectural geometry

This paper resulted from collaboration between two faculties of Belgrade University — Faculty of Mathematics, Department of Geometry, and the Faculty of Architecture, the Chair of Mathematics, Architectural Geometry and CAAD. In this case, the efforts of the two institutions have been focused on introducing topology as a quite complex and rarely covered topic, to a specific audience — the first year students of architecture. The paper gives an overview of a two-hours lecture and a workshop that has been carefully prepared and discussed by a multidisciplinary teaching team, illustrated with appropriate modelled and animated examples, photo-documented (in the workshop part), and video-recorded (a streaming video of this event is available). The Lecture and workshop followed by a series of two small “research by design” tasks for the students — the first to examine architectonics of discretized Mobius strip, and the second to model a spatial form varying the genus of a selected surface. In the conclusion par...

Staying in the Light: Encountering Robert Moses

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid PeiferDavid Peifer is professor and chair of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His research is in geometric group theory. Since meeting Robert Moses, he has become interested in math and social justice issues. email: dpeifer@unca.edu

Publish or Perish? [Microwave Surfing

While doing research on the Nobel laureate P.A.M. Dirac (1902-1984) for his last column, the author came across some interesting bits in the history of science. He noticed that Newton, Dirac, and Hawking were all holders of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, England. The Lucasian Chair of Mathematics was deeded in December 1663 at Cambridge University, England, as a result of a gift from Henry Lucas, M.P. for the university. The first holder of the Lucasian Chair was Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), who made fundamental theoretical contributions to geometrical optics. He was followed by Sir Isaac Newton as the second holder of the chair and then some three hundred years later by Stephen Hawking, who occupied the chair for thirty years (1979-2009), retiring from the chair on 1 October 2009 at the age of 67 (as required by the university rules). The current holder of the chair is Michael Green, a cofounder of string theory. Many holders of this prestigious academic chair have made important contributions to the field of electromagnetics. The author summarizes the contributions of several other famous holders of the chair and their publishing output. [Note: This column first appeared in the December 2009 issue of IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.]

A Mathematical Trip to Princeton

Please send all submissions to Mathematical Tourist Editor, Dirk Huylebrouck, Aartshertogstraat 42, 8400 Oostende, Belgium e-mail: dirk.huylebrouck@gmail.com T he phone rings and a familiar voice speaks. ‘‘Since you’re going to Princeton this summer, you’ll surely be taking a tour of the Princeton campus, and their math department. When you go there, be sure to take note of a sculpture near the Math Department Commons Room. This piece involves three mathematicians: One was the artist, another commissioned the piece, and the third was the one to whom it was dedicated. When you get back, tell me what you ... what? No time? I’m sorry, you make the time.’’ Orders are orders, so you make the time and tour the beautiful Princeton University Campus. There, you find that sculpture, along with an ivory tower and many other sights worth seeing. The Princeton University mathematics department may or may not be in first place in the mythical USA Mathematics Marathon, but it is certainly up there in the lead pack. Two Fine Halls have housed the Princeton math department, both named for Henry Burchard Fine (1858–1928), the first chair of mathematics at Princeton and President of the American Mathematical Society in 1911–1912. The first building was opened in 1930; it was renamed Jones Hall in 1968 when the second and current Fine Hall was built. In the immediate vicinity of the current Fine Hall are one building and two sculptures worth a second look. The building is the Lewis Science Library [4], which opened in 2008. Designed by architect Frank O. Gehry, it is a mathematical marvel in its own right. (Go inside and look around: It’s time well spent.) Viewed from the Fine Hall tower, it resembles a cell complex (Figure 1). The library is one among many architectural gems at Princeton, as an architect friend from high-school and his historian wife demonstrated during a campus tour. The library stands next to Fine Hall on what was formerly the site of an informal volleyball court used by the math faculty and students. Apparently, when Fields Medalist William Thurston was on the faculty, he supplied the net, which he put up in the morning and took down in the evening. Two steel sculptures of mathematical character stand in the vicinity. The older one is Alexander Calder’s 26-foot sculpture ‘‘Five Disks: One Empty;’’ [3] dedicated in 1971, it stands in the Fine Hall courtyard plaza between the mathematics and physics departments. (Maybe it looks like a horse, and maybe it doesn’t–Modern Art is like that.) The newer one is Richard Serra’s ‘‘The Hedgehog and the Fox,’’ [5] a trio of 90-foot long and 15-foot high nested serpentine steel ribbons standing just east of the library. It’s fun to walk through this huge installation and listen to the echoes. Appropriately, when viewed from the Fine Hall tower, ‘‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’’ looks like a triple integral sign (Figure 2).

Pythagoras in Paris: Petrus Ramus Imagines the Prehistory of Mathematics

In 1566, Petrus Ramus and Jacques Charpentier, both professors at the University of Paris, clashed publicly over the tenure of a chair in mathematics at the Collège Royale. Over the course of their contest—conducted both in the courtroom and through printed pamphlets—both authors constructed histories of mathematics that would portray the science in a way most favorable to each and his claim upon the disputed chair. Ramus, in particular, devoted his Prooemium mathematicum to an ambitious (though quite tendentious) history, in which he transformed the figure of Pythagoras from an other-worldly number mystic into a practical schoolmaster, who taught mathematics precisely along the lines that Ramus insisted the professor of mathematics should do. Ramus's creative reimagination of Pythagoras had very little to recommend it as a historical hypothesis, but his developing interest in Pythagoras and Charpentier's later caustic reaction anticipate quite remarkably later debates over the mathematization of nature.

What is Sustainable Development

The paper proposes two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable devel­ opment and derives the welfare that they imply. The axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial roJe in society's choices over time. Theorem 1 shows there exist sustainable preferences, which satisfy these axioms. They exhibit sensitivity to the present and to the long-run future, and specify trade­ offs between them. lt exarnines other welfare criteria which are generally utilized: discounted utility, !im inf, long run averages, overtaking and catching-up criteria, Ramsey's criterion, Rawlsian rules, and the of satisfaction of basic needs, and finds that none satisfies the axioms for sustainability. Theorem 2 gives a characterization of all continuous sustainable preferences. Theorem 3 studies a Standard dynarnical system representing the growth of a renew­ able resource. Sustainable preferences are shown to be a natural extension of the equal treatment criterion for finitely many generations, in thesensethat the opti­ mal solutions for such preferences approach the turn pike of an equal-weight finite horizon optirnization problern as the horizon increases. Theorem 3 also shows that sustainable preferences match the experimental evidence in these cases, in the sense that they imply a rate of discount that decreases and approaches zero as time goes to infinity. Theorem 4 exhibits the differences between the optimal paths according to sustainable preferences and discounted utilitarianism in an extension of the classi­ cal Hotelling problern of the optimal depletion of an exhaustible resource. Theorem 5 shows that sustainable optima can be quite different from discounted optima, no matter how small is the discount factor. Subsequent examples show the implications 1 This paper was prepared for an invited presentation at a seminar on Reconsideration of Yalues at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, organized by K. J. Arrow in July 1993. lt was also an in­ vited presentation at the Intergovemamental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Seminar in Montreux, Switzerland, March 1994, at a Seminar on Inconmensurability of Values at Chateaux du Baffy, Nor­ mandy, April 1994, and at the Graduale School of Business of Stanford University in May 1994. 2 UNESCO Chair in Mathematics and Economics and Director, Program on Information and Resources,