Last Updated: 12th November 1996
Professor of the History of Mathematics and Logic at Middlesex University, England. From 1986 to 1988 he was the President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, and for 1992 the Vice-President. In 1991 he was elected an effective member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences.
He took an M.A. in Mathematics at Oxford University in 1967 (B.A. in 1962), and then an MSc in mathematical logic at the London School of Economics in 1966. He has both the doctorate (Ph.D.) and the higher doctorate (D.Sc.) in the history of science at London University, gained in 1969 and 1978 respectively.
From 1974 to 1981 he was editor of the history of science journal Annals of Science. In 1979 he founded the journal History and Philosophy of Science, and edited it until 1992. He was an associate editor of Historia Mathematica for twenty years from its inception in 1974, and again from 1996. He also acts as advisory editor to several other journals and book series, and to the editions of the writings of C.S. Peirce and Bertrand Russell. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics from 1977 to 1993.
He has given over 400 invited lectures to organisations and societies, or to conferences and congresses, in over 20 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa and Portugal.
He has published eleven books and around 150 main papers, and hundreds of book and article reviews, or short contributions to journals, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. He edited a substantial Companion Encyclopaedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences (two volumes, 1994, London, Routledge). His latest individual book is Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800-1840. From the Calculus and Mechanics to Mathematical Analysis and Mathematical Physics (three volumes, 1990, Basel and Berlin, Birkhauser); in press is The Fontana History of the Mathematical Sciences: the Rainbow of Mathematics (1997, London, Fontana).
He is the Associate Editor for the mathematicians and statisticians for the New Dictionary of National Biography, to be published in 2004. He is working on the history of mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics from 1870 to 1930.