Joan L. Richards

Last updated

Joan Livingston Richards (born 1948) [1] is an American historian of mathematics and a professor of history at Brown University, where she directs the Program of Science and Technology Studies. [2]

Contents

Education and career

Richards graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1971. She completed a Ph.D. in the history of science at Harvard University in 1981. [3] Her dissertation, Non-Euclidean Geometry In Nineteenth-century England: A Study of Changing Perceptions of Mathematical Truth, was supervised by I. Bernard Cohen. [4]

After postdoctoral research at Cornell University, she joined the Brown University faculty in 1982, and was promoted to full professor in 2001. [3]

Books

Richards is the author of the monograph Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England (Academic Press, 1988) [5] and of a memoir on her struggle to balance her academic work with caring for a son with a brain tumor, Angles of Reflection: Logic and a Mother's Love (W. H. Freeman, 2000). [6]

She is the co-editor of The Invention of Physical Science: Intersections of Mathematics, Theology and Natural Philosophy since the Seventeenth Century, Essays in Honor of Erwin N. Hiebert (with Mary Jo Nye and Roger H. Stuewer, Kluwer, 1992). [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Branko Grünbaum</span> Yugoslav American mathematician

Branko Grünbaum was a Croatian-born mathematician of Jewish descent and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

David Scott Brown is a Horace E. Raffensperger professor of history at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, United States. He is the author of several books, including biographies of Richard Hofstadter and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jin Akiyama</span> Japanese mathematician

Jin Akiyama is a Japanese mathematician, known for his appearances on Japanese prime-time television (NHK) presenting magic tricks with mathematical explanations. He is director of the Mathematical Education Research Center at the Tokyo University of Science, and professor emeritus at Tokai University.

Barbara Diane MacCluer is an American mathematician, formerly a professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and now a professor emeritus there. Her research specialty is in operator theory and composition operators; she is known for the books she has written on this subject and related areas of functional analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Annalisa Crannell</span> American mathematician

Annalisa Crannell is an American mathematician, and an expert in the mathematics of water waves, chaos theory, and geometric perspective. She is a professor of mathematics at Franklin & Marshall College.

Mary Elizabeth Flahive is a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University. Her research interests are in number theory; she is the author of two books on difference equations and Diophantine approximation, and is also interested in the geometry of numbers and algebraic coding theory.

Ruth F. Curtain was an Australian mathematician who worked for many years in the Netherlands as a professor of mathematics at the University of Groningen. Her research concerned infinite-dimensional linear systems.


Siobhan Roberts is a Canadian science journalist, biographer, and historian of mathematics.

Sherman Kopald Stein is an American mathematician and an author of mathematics textbooks. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. His writings have won the Lester R. Ford Award and the Beckenbach Book Prize.

Nail Hairullovich Ibragimov was a Russian mathematician and mathematical physicist. At his death he was a professor emeritus at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. Ibragimov's research area was differential calculus, group analysis and mathematical physics. He was the author of many books on mathematics and mathematical physics.

Judita Cofman (1936–2001) was a Yugoslav-German mathematician, the first person to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Novi Sad. She was known for her work in finite geometry and for her books aimed at young mathematicians.

Doris G. Skillman Stockton (1924–2018) was an American mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and Banach spaces, and known for her many mathematics textbooks. For many years she was a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Linda Dalrymple Henderson is an American art historian, educator, and curator. Henderson is currently the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on modern art, specifically twentieth-century American and European art.

Lynn Gamwell is an American nonfiction author and art curator known for her books on art history, the history of mathematics, the history of science, and their connections.

Rona Gurkewitz is an American mathematician and computer scientist, known for her work on modular origami. She is a professor emerita of computer science at Western Connecticut State University, and the former head of the department of computer science there.

Judith Veronica Field is a British historian of science with interests in mathematics and the impact of science in art, an honorary visiting research fellow in the Department of History of Art of Birkbeck, University of London, former president of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, and president of the Leonardo da Vinci Society.

Helena Mary Pycior is an American historian known for her works in the history of mathematics, Marie Curie, and human-animal relations. She is a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Laura Toti Rigatelli (1941-2023) was an Italian historian of mathematics, founder of the Center for Medieval Mathematics at the University of Siena, biographer of Évariste Galois, and author of many books on the history of mathematics.

Deborah Jo Bennett is an American mathematician, mathematics educator, and book author. She is a professor of mathematics at New Jersey City University.

References

  1. ↑ Birth year from Library of Congress catalog entry, retrieved 2020-09-05
  2. ↑ Joan L. Richards, Brown University Department of History, retrieved 2020-09-05
  3. 1 2 Curriculum vitae (PDF), Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, August 2018, retrieved 2020-09-05
  4. ↑ Joan L. Richards at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ↑ Reviews of Mathematical Visions:
  6. ↑ Reviews of Angles of Reflection:
  7. ↑ Review of The Invention of Physical Science:
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.