Conflicts Between Generalization, Rigor, and Intuition - Gert Schubring

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Résumé :
This volume is, as may be readily apparent, the fruit of many years? labor in archives and libraries, unearthing rare books, researching Nachl?sse, and above all, systematic comparative analysis of fecund sources. The work not only demanded much time in preparation, but was also interrupted by other duties, such as time spent as a guest professor at universities abroad, which of course provided welcome opportunities to present and discuss the work, and in particular, the organizing of the 1994 International Gra?mann Conference and the subsequent editing of its proceedings. If it is not possible to be precise about the amount of time spent on this work, it is possible to be precise about the date of its inception. In 1984, during research in the archive of the ?cole polytechnique, my attention was drawn to the way in which the massive rupture that took place in 1811?precipitating the change back to the synthetic method and replacing the limit method by the method of the quantit?s infiniment petites?significantly altered the teaching of analysis at this first modern institution of higher education, an institution originally founded as a citadel of the analytic method.

Sommaire:
Gert Schubring is a retired member of the Institut f?r Didaktik der Mathematik, a research institute at Bielefeld University, and was for various periods a visiting professor for history of mathematics at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). His research interests focus on the history of mathematics and the sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their systemic interrelation with social-cultural systems. One of his specialisations is history of mathematics education. He has published a great number of papers in journals and many books, among which is Conflicts between Generalization, Rigor and Intuition: Number Concepts Underlying the Development of Analysis in 17th-19th century France and Germany (New York, 2005). He was Chief-Editor of the International Journal for the History of Mathematics Education from 2005 to 2015, and is co-editor of the series International Studies in the History of Mathematics and its Teaching, published by Springer. He organised and co-organised various international workshops and conferences on history of mathematics education and history of mathematics.. He participated in numerous Juries for doctoral dissertations in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Spain, Australia and Brazil. In 2019, he received the Hans Freudenthal Award by the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI), for having established the research programme on the history of mathematics education....