Carl Benjamin Boyer

Early life and education

Boyer was born in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, on November 3, 1906, and graduated as 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. 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.

Career

Along with Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's Hunter College; C. Doris Hellman of the Pratt Institute, and later City University of New York'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.

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".

Boyer wrote the books The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959), originally published as The Concepts of the Calculus (1939), History of Analytic Geometry (1956), The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959), and A History of Mathematics (1968). He served as book-review editor of Scripta Mathematica, published by Yeshiva University.

Personal life

In 1978, Boyer's widow, the former Marjorie Duncan Nice, a professor of history, established the Carl B. Boyer Memorial Prize, to be awarded annually to a Columbia University non US citizen undergraduate for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic.

Death

Boyer died of a heart attack in New York City on April 26, 1976.

References

Notes

Further reading

• Boyer, Carl B. (August 30–September 6, 1950). Lecture: "The Foremost Textbook of Modern Times." International Congress of Mathematicians, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Retrieved on 2009-02-20.
• Boyer, Carl B. (1949). The history of the calculus and its conceptual development Hafner Publishing Company, New York, ed. Dover 1959. Retrieved on 2010-03-30.

References

1. Dauben, Joseph Warren and Scriba, Christoph J. (2002) [https://books.google.com/books?id=oXjMYIonXTYC ''Writing the history of mathematics: its historical development''], Birkhäuser. Cf. [https://books.google.com/books?id=oXjMYIonXTYC&q=boyer pp.380-381] for the biography of Boyer.
2. Wallace, David Foster. "An excerpt from ''Everything and More''".
3. 9783319396491
4. Gleason, Mary Louise (1999) [https://www.jstor.org/stable/238014 "The Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society"], ''Isis'', Vol. 90, Supplement: ''Catching up with the Vision: Essays on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the History of Science Society'', pp. S200-S218. University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
5. Staff (May 3, 1954) [https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1954/05/03/92826911.pdf "Guggenheim Fund Grants $1,000,000"] ''[[The New York Times]]''
6. [https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/916224186 WorldCat.org OCLC=916224186]
7. [https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=4984&recCount=25&recPointer=1&bibId=8312338 Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=8312338]
8. [https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=4886&recCount=25&recPointer=1&bibId=7462342 Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=7462342]
9. [https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=4984&recCount=25&recPointer=6&bibId=3111320 Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=3111320]
10. [https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=4984&recCount=25&recPointer=4&bibId=3121041 Library of Congress Online Catalog, BIBLD=3121041]
11. (1950). "Scripta Mathematica".
12. Unknown (March 21, 2010) [http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=marjorie-boyer&pid=140931766 "Marjorie Boyer" (paid obituary)], ''[[The New York Times]]''
13. "Columbia College Bulletin:Prizes and Fellowships".