The teaching and history of mathematics in the United States

by Florian Cajori

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE INFLUX OF FRENCH MATHEMATICS. During the latter part of the eighteenth century we see the French people rising with fearful unanimity, destroying their old institutions, and upon their ruins planting a new order of things. With this period begins the interest in popular education in France. A new impetus was given also to higher scientific education, which continued to be far in advance of that of the rest of Europe. In 1794 was opened in Paris the Polytechnic School and in the following year the Schools of Application. The Polytechnic School gained a world-wide celebrity. The professors at this institution were men whose names are household words wherever science has a votary. Lagrange, Lacroix, and Poisson laid the basis to its course in analytical mathematics; Laplace, Ampere, and others to that of analytical mechanics and astronomy. Descriptive geometry and its applications had for their first teachers the founder of this science, the illustrious Monge and his celebrated pupils, Hachette and Arago. The success of the Polytechnic School was phenomenal. It was the nurse of giants. Among its pupils were Arago, Biot, Bourdon, Canchy, Chasles, Dnhamel, Dupin, Gay-Lussac, Le Verrier, Poncelet, Regnault. The Polytechnic School is of special interest to those who live in America, because the U. S. Military Academy at West Point was a germ from it. Compared with the French mathematicians who flourished at the beginning of this century the contemporary American professors were mere Liliputians. The masterpieces of French scholars were unknown in America. What little mathematical knowledge existed here came to us through English channels. For that reason that epoch was called the period of the influx of English mathematics. As compared with colonial times, conside...

400 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Florian Cajori was a Swiss-American historian of mathematics.