Around Caspar Wessel And The Geometric Representation Of Complex Numbers

The present collection of essays are published in honor of the distinguished historian of mathematics Professor Emeritus Jesper Lützen. In a career that spans more than four decades, Professor Lützen's scholarly contributions have enhanced our understanding of the history, development, and organization of mathematics. The essays cover a broad range of areas connected to Professor Lützen's work. In addition to this noteworthy scholarship, Professor Lützen has always been an exemplary colleague, providing support to peers as well as new faculty and graduate students. We dedicate this Festschrift to Professor Lützen—as a scholarly role model, mentor, colleague, and friend.

This authoritative text presents the classical theory of functions of a single complex variable in complete mathematical and historical detail. Requiring only minimal, undergraduate-level prerequisites, it covers the fundamental areas of the subject with depth, precision, and rigor. Standard and novel proofs are explored in unusual detail, and exercises – many with helpful hints – provide ample opportunities for practice and a deeper understanding of the material. In addition to the mathematical theory, the author also explores how key ideas in complex analysis have evolved over many centuries, allowing readers to acquire an extensive view of the subject’s development. Historical notes are incorporated throughout, and a bibliography containing more than 2,000 entries provides an exhaustive list of both important and overlooked works. Classical Analysis in the Complex Plane will be a definitive reference for both graduate students and experienced mathematicians alike, as well as an exemplary resource for anyone doing scholarly work in complex analysis. The author’s expansive knowledge of and passion for the material is evident on every page, as is his desire to impart a lasting appreciation for the subject. “I can honestly say that Robert Burckel’s book has profoundly influenced my view of the subject of complex analysis. It has given me a sense of the historical flow of ideas, and has acquainted me with byways and ancillary results that I never would have encountered in the ordinary course of my work. The care exercised in each of his proofs is a model of clarity in mathematical writing...Anyone in the field should have this book on [their bookshelves] as a resource and an inspiration.”- From the Foreword by Steven G. Krantz

​This book is a history of complex function theory from its origins to 1914, when the essential features of the modern theory were in place. It is the first history of mathematics devoted to complex function theory, and it draws on a wide range of published and unpublished sources. In addition to an extensive and detailed coverage of the three founders of the subject – Cauchy, Riemann, and Weierstrass – it looks at the contributions of authors from d’Alembert to Hilbert, and Laplace to Weyl. Particular chapters examine the rise and importance of elliptic function theory, differential equations in the complex domain, geometric function theory, and the early years of complex function theory in several variables. Unique emphasis has been devoted to the creation of a textbook tradition in complex analysis by considering some seventy textbooks in nine different languages. The book is not a mere sequence of disembodied results and theories, but offers a comprehensive picture of the broad cultural and social context in which the main actors lived and worked by paying attention to the rise of mathematical schools and of contrasting national traditions. The book is unrivaled for its breadth and depth, both in the core theory and its implications for other fields of mathematics. It documents the motivations for the early ideas and their gradual refinement into a rigorous theory.​

In the steam-powered mechanical age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians depended on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Though not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book—from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton—relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues. The letters they exchanged, together with the equations, diagrams, tables, or pictures that filled their manuscripts and publications, were all tangible traces of abstract ideas that extended mathematicians into their social and material environment. Each chapter of this book explores a thing, or assembling of things, mathematicians needed to do their work—whether a textbook, museum, journal, library, diagram, notebook, or letter—all characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century British taskscape, but also representative of great change to a discipline brought about by an industrialized world in motion.

This book examines the development of mathematics from the late 16th Century to the end of the 19th Century. Each chapter will focus on a particular topic and outline its history with the provision of facsimiles of primary source material along with explanatory notes and modern interpretations.