David Eugene Smith

David Eugene Smith
David Eugene Smith
Born	January 21, 1860 Cortland, New York
Died	July 29, 1944 (1944-07-30) (aged 84) New York City, New York
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Mathematics

David Eugene Smith (January 21, 1860 – July 29, 1944) was an American mathematician, educator, and editor.

Education and career

David Eugene Smith is considered one of the founders of the field of mathematics education. Smith was born in Cortland, New York, to Abram P. Smith, attorney and surrogate judge, and Mary Elizabeth Bronson, who taught her young son Latin and Greek.^[1] He attended Syracuse University, graduating in 1881 (Ph. D., 1887; LL.D., 1905). He studied to be a lawyer concentrating in arts and humanities, but accepted an instructorship in mathematics at the Cortland Normal School in 1884 ^[2] where he attended as a young man.^[3] While at the Cortland Normal School Smith became a member of the Young Men's Debating Club^[4] (today the Delphic Fraternity.) He became a professor at the Michigan State Normal College in 1891 (later Eastern Michigan University), the principal at the State Normal School in Brockport, New York (1898), and a professor of mathematics at Teachers College, Columbia University (1901) where he remained until his retirement in 1926.

Smith became president of the Mathematical Association of America in 1920^[2] and served as the president of the History of Science Society in 1927.^[5] He also wrote a large number of publications of various types. He was editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society; contributed to other mathematical journals; published a series of textbooks; translated Felix Klein's Famous Problems of Geometry, Fink's History of Mathematics, and the Treviso Arithmetic. He edited^[6] Augustus De Morgan's A Budget of Paradoxes (1915) and wrote many books on Mathematics which are listed below.

Works

• Plane and Solid Geometry (1895), with Wooster Woodruff Beman^[7]
• History of Modern Mathematics (1896; as a separate work, 1910) Cornell Historical Math Monographs
• The Teaching of Elementary Mathematics (1900) Cornell Historical Math Monographs
• Intermediate Arithmetic (1905)
• The Teaching of Arithmetic (1909; revised edition, 1913)
• The Teaching of Geometry (1912)
• Rara Arithmetica (1908)^[8]
• The Hindu-Arabic Numerals (1911), with Louis Charles Karpinski
• A Bibliography on the Teaching of Mathematics (1912), with Charles Goldziher
• A History of Japanese Mathematics (1914), with Yoshio Mikami
• Number Stories of Long Ago (1919)
• Mathematics In series Our Debt to Greece and Rome. (1923) Michigan Historical Math Collection
• History of Mathematics: 2 Volumes (1923/5). Reprinted Dover, 1958.
• A History of Mathematics in America before 1900 (1934),^[9] with Jekuthiel Ginsburg; Carus Mathematical Monographs

References

External links

• David Eugene Smith from the Education Encyclopedia — StateUniversity.com
• Works by David Eugene Smith at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about David Eugene Smith at Internet Archive
  • History Of Mathematics Vol. 1 (1923), Vol. 2 (1925)
  • History of Modern Mathematics (1906)
• More electronic books by Smith, David Eugene at DML: Digital Mathematics Library
• Lao Genevra Simons David Eugene Smith—In memoriam Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 51, (1945), 40–50.