Information on the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
This History of Mathematics archive is part of the
Mathematical MacTutor
system developed at the
School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences University of St Andrews
for learning and experimenting with mathematics.
The archive contains the biographies of more than 1100 mathematicians. We have recently reorganised it so that all the mathematicians now have individual biographies and have added more extensive references. You can access them from a selection of Alphabetical or Chronological Biographical indexes.
We have written some articles on the development of mathematical ideas cross-referenced to the biographies. You can access these using the History Topics Index.
There is a collection of more than 60 articles on Famous Curves which have been extensively studied by mathematicians, giving their history as well as pictures of the curves and various curves (evolutes, inverses, caustics etc.) which are associated with them.
There are Chronologies showing the overlapping lives of the mathematicians in our archive.
We have a Mathematicians of the day page which contains details of the mathematicians who were born or died on today's date and another file: Anniversaries for the year containing details for all dates.
You may like to try our Birthplace Map. This shows the birthplaces of those Western European mathematicians in our list of biographies and allows one to access the whole of our list by country of birth.
Some further Instructions are available.
There is a Search Form (or a Simple Search Form for browsers without forms)
which allows you to find references to keywords throughout the archive.
You may like to try some of our Search Suggestions.
More details of the Mathematical MacTutor system are available.
There are other good sources of information concerning the history of mathematics available on the web.
John O'Connor 
and Edmund F Robertson 
School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences
University of St Andrews
St Andrews Fife KY16 9SS
Scotland
Welcome page Famous curves index Biographical Index Chronologies History Topics Index Birthplace Map Mathematicians of the day Anniversaries for the year Search Form Simple Search Form Search Suggestions