Glen Van Brummelen
Photo of Glen showing off a gift from one of his students.

Glen Robert Van Brummelen (born May 20th, 1965) is a Canadian historian of mathematics specializing in 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).

Life

Van Brummelen earned his PhD degree from Simon Fraser University in 1993,[2] 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.[3]

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.[4] His second book, Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry, concerns spherical trigonometry.[5][6]

He teaches courses on the history of mathematics and trigonometry at MathPath, specifically Heavenly Mathematics and Spherical Trigonometry. He is also well known for the glensheep and the "glenneagon", a variant on the enneagon (as well as to a lesser extent the glenelephant, and to even lesser extent the glenturtle), a two-dimensional animal he coined at MathPath.

Works

  • The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN 9780691129730, OCLC 750691811
  • Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 9780691175997, OCLC 988234342
  • Trigonometry: A Very Short Introduction; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020 ISBN 9780198814313, OCLC 1101269106
  • The Doctrine of Triangles: The History of Modern Trigonometry Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021 ISBN 978-0691179414, OCLC 1201300540

References

  1. ↑ CSHPM Council, retrieved 2013-12-26.
  2. ↑ Glen Van Brummelen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ "Trinity Western University Welcomes New Dean of the Faculty of Natural and Applied Sciences". Trinity Western University. 29 May 2020. Retrieved 8 June 2020.
  4. ↑ McRae, Alan S. (2009), Review of The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth, MR2473955.
  5. ↑ Steele, John M. (July 2013), "A forgotten discipline (review of Heavenly Mathematics)", Metascience, doi:10.1007/s11016-013-9836-9, S2CID 254793113
  6. ↑ Funk, Martin (2013), Review of Heavenly Mathematics, MR3012466.


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