The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive is a website maintained by John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson and hosted by the University of St Andrews in Scotland. It contains detailed biographies on many historical and contemporary mathematicians, as well as information on famous curves and various topics in the history of mathematics.
The History of Mathematics archive is part of a larger project, the Mathematical MacTutor system, by the same authors, which is an 18-megabyte HyperCard database. MacTutor covers a wide range of mathematical topics, though its contents have been biased by the interests and enthusiasms of its authors. They have concentrated on areas where O'Connor and Robertson think that the computer, and particularly graphics capabilities of the Apple Macintosh, can give insights not available in other ways. Thus, in addition to the calculus topics that one would expect to find in any mathematical software, MacTutor is particularly strong in geometry, algebra (and in particular, group theory), graph theory, number theory as well as stacks on statistics, matrices and complex analysis.
Famous quotes containing the words history, mathematics and/or archive:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (18911960)
“Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we dont happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data ... and yet we dont understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.”
—Simone Weil (19091943)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (19121989)