IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB716397024

Faire l’histoire d’un objet ou celle d’un concept mathématique avec les fonctions mathématiques comme cas d’étude privilégié (2023)

Dhombres, Jean (Author)

Almagest
Volume: 14
Issue: 2
Pages: 98-135
Publication date: 2023
Language: English

DOI: 10.1484/J.ALMA.5.136761

URI: https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.ALMA.5.136761

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

The historiography of mathematical functions already includes many references of often respectable size, and the present work is neither a new course, nor a kind of summary relating to some original texts not yet analyzed on this subject. It is intended to be a reflection on the practice of the history of mathematics. On the one hand, this is because this work is based on various presentations made previously which are generally unpublished, in the now venerable framework created by the seniority and a number of Franco-Mexican meetings. On the other hand, it is also because this work raises the question of the objective, and also of the issue of objectivity, that exists in telling the history of a theorem, a concept or a mathematical object. And I should not forget the way of using both the sources and the technical knowledge of prospective readers. It is in fact important to signal how deeply the writing of a text in the history of mathematics depends on such readers. While three words seem, wrongly, to frame very specific things that I wish to discuss : history of the fundamental theorem of algebra, concept of variable quantity, or the function object. In the three cases, the difficulty is to deal with things which have acquired their name only long after the nature of the theorem, the properties of the concept or of the object have circulated in various forms. The dangers, that of anachronism in particular, are to freeze a situation, such as a photograph with a dummy background shot, or to neglect or overestimate the importance of the contemporary situation. Our question here is to concretely analyze these dangers in the case of functions, not to destroy previous accounts, but to bring out prejudices, and to allow us to grasp the differences that there are in qualifying a concept or an object. [English translation of title by DeepL.com: Create the history of an object or mathematical concept, using mathematical functions as a case study.]

...More

Included in

Article Vincent Jullien; Carmen Martínez-Adame (2023) Foreward. Almagest (pp. 6-14). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB716397024

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Alan J. Rocke; (2022)
Reflections on the Last and the Next Hundred Years (/p/isis/citation/CBB294366367/)

Article Adrian Currie; Kirsten Walsh; (2019)
Frameworks for Historians and Philosophers (/p/isis/citation/CBB164654591/)

Article Ian Hesketh; (2016)
Counterfactuals and history: Contingency and convergence in histories of science and life (/p/isis/citation/CBB385183310/)

Article Robert Bud; (2016)
Representing scale: What should be special about the heritage of mass science? (/p/isis/citation/CBB100969947/)

Article William H. Brock; (2022)
The Long and Short of It: The Future Writing of History of Chemistry (/p/isis/citation/CBB683831416/)

Article Jeffrey I. Seeman; (2022)
Remote Interviewing and the History of Chemistry (/p/isis/citation/CBB903379745/)

Article Stephen J. Weininger; (2022)
“The Poor Sister:” Coming to Grips with Recent and Contemporary Chemistry (/p/isis/citation/CBB175973451/)

Article Seth C. Rasmussen; (2022)
Moving Beyond the Intersection of Chemistry and History: Evolving Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Historical Study of Chemistry (/p/isis/citation/CBB331794954/)

Article Peter J. T. Morris; Jeffrey I. Seeman; (2022)
The Importance of Plurality and Mutual Respect in the Practice of the History of Chemistry (/p/isis/citation/CBB375881495/)

Article Ana Barahona; (2023)
Erasing borders: a new look at the historiography of science (/p/isis/citation/CBB305194897/)

Article Sven Dupré; Geert Somsen; (2019)
The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies (/p/isis/citation/CBB931053546/)

Article Hallvard J. Fossheim; (2019)
Past responsibility: History and the ethics of research on ethnic groups (/p/isis/citation/CBB562849198/)

Article Paul Merchant; (2019)
What Oral Historians and Historians of Science Can Learn from Each Other (/p/isis/citation/CBB829034696/)

Article Wang, Yangzong; (2011)
The Chinese Way in Science and the Oral History of Modern Science in China (/p/isis/citation/CBB001221315/)

Article Duan, Lian; (2011)
Museums of Natural Science and Technology and Oral History (/p/isis/citation/CBB001221318/)

Article David Rabouin; Anne-Lise Rey; (2022)
La science classique dans la Revue d’histoire des sciences (/p/isis/citation/CBB509066510/)

Article Miguel García-Sancho; (2016)
The proactive historian: Methodological opportunities presented by the new archives documenting genomics (/p/isis/citation/CBB617165915/)

Article François Duchesneau; (2022)
Styles et modèles d’histoire des sciences biologiques: Revue d’histoire des sciences (1947-2022) (/p/isis/citation/CBB253984231/)

Article Stéphane Tirard; (2022)
L’histoire de l’histoire naturelle et de l’évolutionnisme dans la Revue d’histoire des sciences (/p/isis/citation/CBB014960563/)

Article Joachim L. Dagg; (2019)
Motives and merits of counterfactual histories of science (/p/isis/citation/CBB710171767/)