| Carl Benjamin Boyer | |
| Birth Date: | 3 November 1906 |
| Birth Place: | Hellertown, Pennsylvania, U.S.[1] |
| Death Place: | New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Historian of mathematics |
Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history".[2] It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."[3]
Boyer was valedictorian of his high school class. He received a B.A. from Columbia College in 1928 and an M.A. in 1929. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University in 1939.[1] He was a full professor of Mathematics at the City University of New York's Brooklyn College from 1952 until his death, although he had begun tutoring and teaching at Brooklyn College in 1928.[1]
Along with Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's Hunter College; C. Doris Hellman of the Pratt Institute, and later CUNY's Queens College; and Lynn Thorndike of Columbia University, Boyer was instrumental in the 1953 founding of the Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society.[4]
In 1954, Boyer was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his work in the history of science. In particular, the grant made reference to "the history of the theory of the rainbow".[5]
Boyer wrote the books The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959),[6] originally published as The Concepts of the Calculus (1939),[7] History of Analytic Geometry (1956),[8] The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959),[9] and A History of Mathematics (1968).[10] He served as book-review editor of Scripta Mathematica.[11]
Boyer died of a heart attack in New York City in 1976.
In 1978, Boyer's widow, the former Marjorie Duncan Nice, a professor of history,[12] established the Carl B. Boyer Memorial Prize, to be awarded annually to a Columbia University undergraduate for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic.[13]
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Further reading