BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
I am one of a rare breed on the faculty at the University of
Virginia--a native Virginian. I did my undergraduate studies in French
and mathematics as well as my M. S. in mathematics here at the University
before pursuing my graduate work at the University of Chicago. I earned
my Ph.D. in history from Chicago, where I was privileged to work under the
supervision of I. N. Herstein in mathematics and Allen G. Debus in the
history of science. My doctoral work explored the history of the theory of
algebras and especially the role played by Joseph H. M. Wedderburn in
that development.
Since 1988, I have been on the faculty here at UVa where I have a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and History, teaching mathematics and the history of mathematics in the Mathematics Department and the history of science in the History Department. From 1990 through 1999, I was involved with Historia Mathematica, the international journal for the history of mathematics, first as Book Review Editor (1990-1994), then as Managing Editor (1994-1996), and finally as Editor (1996-1999). I served as a member of the Council of the American Mathematical Society (1998-2001) and as a member of the Council of the History of Science Society (2001-2004). In 2002, I was elected a Corresponding Member of the Académie internationale d'histoire des sciences and the Chair of the International Commission for History of Mathematics (ICHM), the latter for a term for the four calendar years from 2002 through 2005. I was reelected as Chair of the ICHM for another four-year term from 2006 through 2009.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research interests lie the history of science and mathematics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special mathematical focus on the history of algebra. In addition to exploring technical developments of algebra—the theory of algebras, group theory, algebraic invariant theory— I also work on more thematic issues such as the development of national mathematical research communities (specifically in the United States and Great Britain) and the internationalization of mathematics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I have recently finished a long-range research agenda on the nineteenth-century, British mathematician, James Joseph Sylvester, which resulted, among other publications, in a book published in 1998 with Oxford University Press of Sylvester's selected correspondence with historical and mathematical commentary and in 2006 in his full-scale biography published with the Johns Hopkins University Press.
My work on Sylvester also continued to focus my interests both on issues of internationalization and on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century algebra. The first focus led to an NSF-sponsored conference here at the University of Virginia in 1999 and in a volume of essays, co-edited with Adrian Rice, and published in 2002 by the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society in their joint HMATH series. The second also resulted in an NSF-funded conference, a weeklong workshop on the history of modern algebra at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. The proceedings of the latter conference, co-edited with Jeremy Gray, were published in 2007 also in the HMATH series.
At present, I am embarking on a new, long-range project on the development of the mathematical research community in twentieth-century America.