Florian Cajori

Florian Cajori (St Aignan, Switzerland, February 28, 1859 – August 14 or 15, 1930,^[1][2] Berkeley, United States) was one of the most celebrated historians of mathematics in his day.

Biography

Florian Cajori emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. He received a Ph.D. at Tulane University, where he taught for a few years before being driven north by his health. He taught at Colorado College, where he founded the Colorado College Scientific Society. Even today his History of Mathematical Notations (1928–29) has been described as "unsurpassed."^[3] In 1918, he was appointed to a specially created chair in history of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in Berkeley, California until his death in 1930.

His last work was revising Motte's Translation of Newton's Principia, vol.1 The Motion of Bodies, but he died before it was finished. The work was finished by R.T.Crawford of Berkeley, California.

The Cajori crater on the Moon was named in his honour.

Notes and references

• Cajori, Florian. "The History of Notations of the Calculus." Annals of Mathematics, 2nd Ser., Vol. 25, No. 1 (Sep., 1923), pp. 1–46
• Cajori, Florian (1993) [1928-1929]. A History of Mathematical Notations. Dover Publications. ISBN 0486677664. http://books.google.com/?id=7juWmvQSTvwC&printsec=frontcover. 

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Florian Cajori", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Cajori.html .
• Florian Cajori at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• Florian Cajori (2010). A History of the Conceptions of Limits and Fluxions in Great Britain, from Newton to Woodhouse. BiblioBazaar. ISBN 9781143056987. http://books.google.ru/books?id=3YAVRAAACAAJ&dq=cajori+%22history+of+the+conceptions+of+limits%22.