Abstract
For the last few years, students in my history of mathematics course have been required to do a bit of research on the web. Each of them chooses from a list of specially chosen questions designed to make them ponder whether the information they find on standard internet sites is solidly grounded and clearly sourced, or whether subsequent research (pursued in such unlikely places as the local university library) might lead a person to doubt what one reads online. The idea here is not to push for a definitive answer; in many cases, this would be a hopeless undertaking anyway. Instead, I ask students merely to report on what they found and how they went about tracking down the information cited in their short reports. It’s all about learning to read sources critically. Here I offer a taste of what my students have to put up with, a set of challenge questions to test the mettle of those Intelligencer readers who might care to chase after some trivia.
Keywords
- Remote Mountainous Locations
- Daniel Kehlmann
- Gauss Writes
- Disquisitiones Generales Circa Superficies Curvas
- Grade School Teachers
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bieberbach, Ludwig. 1938. Carl Friedrich Gauß. Ein deutsches Gelehrtenleben. Berlin: Keil.
Biermann, Kurt-R., ed. 1990. Carl Friedrich Gauss - Der Fürst der Mathematiker in Briefen und Gesprächen. Berlin: Urania-Verlag.
Bjerknes, C.A. 1885. Niels Henrik Abel. En skildring af hans Liv og vitenskapelige Virksomhed. Stockholm, 1880; French trans.
Breitenberger, Ernst. 1984. Gauss’s Geodesy and the Axiom of Parallels. Archive for History of Exact Sciences 31: 273–289.
Cajori, Florian. 1912. Notes on Gauss and his American Descendants. Popular Science Monthly 81: 105–115.
Gray, Jeremy. 2006. Gauss and Non-Euclidean Geometry. In Non-Euclidean Geometries: Janós Bolyai Memorial Volume, ed. András Prékopa and Emil Molnár, 60–80. New York: Springer.
Hansteen, Christian. 1862. Niels Henrik Abel, Illustreret Nyhedsblad, 2 March/9 March, 1862.
Hayes, Brian. 2006. Gauss’s Day of Reckoning. American Scientist 94(3): 200–205.
Hinz, A.M., S. Klavžar, U. Milutinović, and C. Petr. 2013. The Tower of Hanoi – Myths and Maths. Birkhäuser: Basel.
Kehlmann, Daniel. 2006. Measuring the World. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Pantheon Books.
Miller, Arthur. 1972. The Myth of Gauss’ Experiment on the Euclidean Nature of Physical Space. Isis 63: 345–348.
Ore, Oystein. 2008. Niels Henrik Abel: Mathematician Extraordinary. Providence: AMS Chelsea Publishing.
Reich, Karin. 2012. Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen (1809–1876), Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen, Gauß zum Gedächtnis. K. Reich, Hrsg., Leipzig: Edition am Gutenbergplatz Leipzig.
Sartorius von Waltershausen, Wolfgang. 1966. Wolfgang: Gauß zum Gedächtnis, Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1856; Carl Friedrich Gauss: A Memorial. Trans. Helen Worthington Gauss. Colorado Springs.
Scholz, Erhard. 2004. C. F. Gauß’ Präzisionsmessungen terrestrischer Dreiecke und seine Überlegungen zur empirischen Fundierung der Geometrie in den 1820er Jahren. In Form, Zahl, Ordnung. Studien zur Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte. Ivo Schneider zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Folkerts Menso, Hashagen Ulf, and Seising Rudolf, 355–380. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. http://arxiv.org/math.HO/0409578.
Stern, Moritz Abraham. 1877. Denkrede auf Carl Friedrich Gauss zur Feier seines hundertjährigen Geburtstages. Kästner: Göttingen.
Stubhaug, Arild. 2000. Niels Henrik Abel and his Times. New York: Springer.
van der Waerden, Bartel L. 1974. Comment II. Isis 65: 85.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rowe, D.E. (2018). On Gauss and Gaussian Legends: A Quiz. In: A Richer Picture of Mathematics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67819-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67819-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67818-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67819-1
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)