Raymond Clare Archibald

Raymond Clare Archibald (7 October 1875 – 26 July 1955) was a Canadian-American mathematician and historian of mathematics. In 1906 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Quotes

 * Our knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived mainly from tablets in the British Museum, the Prussian State Museum of Berlin, the Ottoman Museum of Constantinople, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Pennsylvania and the Palais du Cinquantenaire of Brussels.


 * In yesteryears there were two gloriously inspiring centers of mathematical study in America. One of these was at the University of Chicago, when Oskar Bolza, and Heinrich Maschke and E. H. Moore were in their prime. The other center was at The Johns Hopkins University, 1876–83, where scholars were        " Led by soaring-genius'd Sylvester," as Sidney Lanier has expressed it in his " Ode to The Johns Hopkins University."


 * ... in America before the end of 1888 there had been appreciable amount of mathematical research, some of it of first importance, even according to recent standards. There had been centers of mathematical inspiration. Such universities as Yale, The Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, had been sending out doctors in mathematics for a number of years, and many Americans had been getting degrees in Europe. The time was ripe for an organization to draw together many people scattered throughout the country who were especially interested in mathematical pursuits.


 * About half a century after Thales came Pythagoras. Under his inspiration geometry was first pursued as a study for its own sake. A man of great ability and a most interesting and magnetic mystic, he finally settled at Crotona on the southeastern coast of Italy.


 * The idea of constructing a table in which the logarithm of unity was zero originated with Napier. Napier and Briggs never thought of logarithms as exponents of a base. ... It was not till considerably later that our modern definition of a logarithm as an exponent was put forward by such mathematicians as David Gregory (mathematician), 1684; William Gardiner (mathematician), 1742; Leonhard Euler, 1748, 1770.