Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was an American historian of sciences, and especially

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the " Gibbon of math history". It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."

Life and career

Boyer was

valedictorian Valedictorian is an academic title for the class rank, highest-performing student of a graduation, graduating class of an academic institution in the United States. The valedictorian is generally determined by an academic institution's grade poin ...

of his

high school A secondary school, high school, or senior school, is an institution that provides secondary education. Some secondary schools provide both ''lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper secondary education'' (ages 14 to 18), i.e., ...

class. He received a B.A. from Columbia College in 1928 and an M.A. in 1929. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University in 1939. He was a full professor of Mathematics at the City University of New York's Brooklyn College from 1952 until his death, although he had begun tutoring and teaching at Brooklyn College in 1928. Along with Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City, United States. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools ...

; C. Doris Hellman of the Pratt Institute, and later CUNY'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. In 1954, Boyer was the recipient of a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

to further his work in the history of science. In particular, the grant made reference to "the history of the theory of the rainbow". Boyer wrote the books ''The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development'' (1959), originally published as ''The Concepts of the Calculus'' (1939), ''History of Analytic Geometry'' (1956), ''The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics'' (1959), and ''A History of Mathematics'' (1968). He served as book-review editor of '' Scripta Mathematica''. Boyer died of a

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in New York City in 1976. In 1978, Boyer's widow, the former Marjorie Duncan Nice, a professor of history, established the Carl B. Boyer Memorial Prize, to be awarded annually to a

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

non US citizen undergraduate for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic.

References

Notes 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 2009-02-20. *Boyer, Carl B. (1949)
The history of the calculus and its conceptual development
Hafner Publishing Company, New York, ed. Dover 1959. Retrieved on 2010-03-30.

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Boyer, Carl Benjamin 1906 births 1976 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians American historians of mathematics 20th-century American historians 20th-century American male writers Columbia College (New York) alumni Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Brooklyn College faculty American male non-fiction writers Educators from Pennsylvania People from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania Writers from Pennsylvania