Transmission of Mathematical Ideas: 2000 Years of Exchange and Influence from Late Babylonian Mathematics to Early Renaissance Science

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SES 99-10964 - Joseph W. Dauben (Lehman College, CUNY) - "Transmission of Mathematical Ideas: 2000 Years of Exchange and Influence from Late Babylonian Mathematics to Early Renaissance Science"This award provides partial support for an International Symposium to be held at the Bellagio Conference Center, May 8-12, 2000, Bellagio, Italy. Other support for this Symposium is being provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Commission on History of Mathematics, and the International Mathematical Union.This conference is designed to investigate the 2000-year history of the transmission of mathematical ideas across cultures, geographically a history that spans the major silk routes and bridges the mathematical achievements of the ancient Mediterranean and those of East Asia, especially India and China. Its organizers plan to convene a group of international experts, scholars with diverse language abilities, to focus attention on texts, problems, methods and examples that, collectively, the organizers anticipate will help to resolve many open questions about the origins and dissemination of mathematical knowledge.How is it possible, for example, to account for the fact that in various texts - from ancient China to medieval Europe - more or less the same problems arise, often using the same examples, parameters, and methods? If virtually identical problems and procedures were not rediscovered from culture to culture independently, then how were they transmitted, and to what effect?The purpose of the Bellagio meeting is to focus attention on early mathematical works, especially those in China, India, the Arabic/Islamic world, and the late Middle Ages/Renaissance in Europe, in order to explore evidence of direct and indirect influences, possible connections, and various means by which the problems or methods devised in one particular place and time found their way to other points, often very distant in both place and time. The value of holding such a conference at Bellagio is that the Conference Center provides a quiet, reflective atmosphere conveniently located to accommodate both scholars from Europe and North America as well as those coming from the Near and Far East, or from North Africa. Bellagio will also provide a relaxed setting for an intensive conference where individual expertise can be collectively shared, and pre-circulated papers can be collectively discussed in anticipation of publishing a book devoted specifically to the problem of how mathematical ideas have migrated across time and cultures.