Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was a historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". He wrote the books History of Analytic Geometry, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development, A History of Mathematics, and The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics. He served as book-review editor of Scripta Mathematica.
Boyer was valedictorian of his high school class. He received an A.B. 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 Brooklyn College from 1952 until his death, although he had begun tutoring and teaching at Brooklyn College in 1928.
Boyer was instrumental as an inspiration to the founding of The Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society.
He was a 1954 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in History of Science & Technology.
He died of a heart attack in New York 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 undergraduate for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic.
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