Glen Robert Van Brummelen (born May 20, 1965) is a Canadian historian of mathematics specializing in the history of trigonometry and historical applications of mathematics to astronomy.
He is president of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics,[1] and was a co-editor of Mathematics and the Historian's Craft: The Kenneth O. May Lectures (Springer, 2005).
Van Brummelen earned his PhD degree from Simon Fraser University in 1993, and served as a professor of mathematics at Bennington College from 1999 to 2006. He then transferred to Quest University Canada as a founding faculty member. In 2020, he became the dean of the Faculty of Natural and Applied Sciences at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC.[2]
Glen Van Brummelen has published the first major history in English of the origins and early development of trigonometry, The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry.[3] His second book, Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry, concerns spherical trigonometry.[4]
In 2016 he received a Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.[5]