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 history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“In mathematics he was greater
Than Tycho Brahe, or Erra Pater:
For he, by geometric scale,
Could take the size of pots of ale;
Resolve, by sines and tangents straight,
If bread and butter wanted weight;
And wisely tell what hour o’ th’ day
The clock doth strike, by algebra.”
—Samuel Butler (1612–1680)
“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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”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 (1912–1989)