Carl Benjamin Boyer
Born	(1906-11-03)November 3, 1906 Hellertown, Pennsylvania, U.S. [1]
Died	April 26, 1976(1976-04-26) (aged 69) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Historian of mathematics

Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the " Gibbon of math history". ^[2] It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science." ^[3]

Boyer was valedictorian of his high school class. He received a B.A. from Columbia College in 1928 and an M.A. in 1929. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University in 1939. ^[1] He was a full professor of Mathematics at the City University of New York's Brooklyn College from 1952 until his death, although he had begun tutoring and teaching at Brooklyn College in 1928. ^[1]

Along with Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's Hunter College; C. Doris Hellman of the Pratt Institute, and later CUNY's Queens College; and Lynn Thorndike of Columbia University, Boyer was instrumental in the 1953 founding of the Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society. ^[4]

In 1954, Boyer was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his work in the history of science. In particular, the grant made reference to "the history of the theory of the rainbow". ^[5]

Boyer wrote the books The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959), ^[6] originally published as The Concepts of the Calculus (1939), ^[7] History of Analytic Geometry (1956), ^[8] The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959), ^[9] and A History of Mathematics (1968). ^[10] He served as book-review editor of Scripta Mathematica. ^[11]

Boyer died of a heart attack in New York City in 1976.

In 1978, Boyer's widow, the former Marjorie Duncan Nice, a professor of history, ^[12] established the Carl B. Boyer Memorial Prize, to be awarded annually to a Columbia University undergraduate for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic. ^[13]

Notes

Further reading

• Boyer, Carl B. (August 30–September 6, 1950). Lecture: "The Foremost Textbook of Modern Times." International Congress of Mathematicians, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Retrieved on 2009-02-20.
• Boyer, Carl B. (1949). The history of the calculus and its conceptual development Hafner Publishing Company, New York, ed. Dover 1959. Retrieved on 2010-03-30.

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