Ivor Grattan-Guinness is a prolific British historian of mathematics and logic, at Middlesex University.

His work touches on all historical periods, but he is particularly interested in Euclid, and the rise of functional analysis and mathematical logic. He has been especially interested in characterising how past thinkers far removed from us in time view their findings differently from the way we see them now, and has emphasised the importance of ignorance in this task.

Grattan-Guinness spent much of his career at Middlesex University Business School. He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and is a member of the Academie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences.

Selected publications

Books written

• 2000. From the Calculus to Set Theory 1630-1910: An Introductory History. Princeton Uni. Press. ISBN 0-691-07082-2.
• 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940: Logics, Set Theories, and the Foundations of Mathematics from Cantor through Russell to Godel. Princeton Uni. Press. ISBN 0-691-05858-X. Enormous bibliography.

Books edited

• 2000. The Rainbow of Mathematics: A History of the Mathematical Sciences. W. W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-32030-8.
• 2003. Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences, 2 vols. Johns Hopkins Uni. Press. ISBN 0-8018-7396-X.

Articles

• 2002. "A Sideways Look at Hilbert’s Twenty-Three Problems of 1900," Notices of the American Mathematical Society 47: 752-757.

External links

• Academic home page
• Encomium at Mathematical Sciences Foundation

Historians of science