Craig Fraser

Craig Fraser, Oberwolfach 2004

Craig Graham Fraser (born May 4, 1951 in Sarnia ) is a Canadian historian of science.

Fraser graduated from Carleton University with a bachelor's degree, from the University of British Columbia with a master's degree, and received his PhD with Kenneth O. May at the University of Toronto . He is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Toronto and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology .

He is primarily concerned with the history of analysis (especially the calculus of variations , basics of analysis) and analytical mechanics (also Hamilton mechanics or Hamilton-Jacobi theory in the 19th century) with a focus on the phase of their development in the 18th century , for example Joseph-Louis Lagrange (Analytical Mechanics), Leonhard Euler , Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (and history of the d'Alembert principle ), Carl Gustav Jacobi , Adolph Mayer , Karl Weierstrass . He is also concerned with the development of cosmology in the 20th century and its relationship to observational astronomy.

He was editor of Historia Mathematica from 2000 to 2006 and is associate editor there. He is chairman of the International Commission for the History of Mathematics and a member of the International Academy of the History of Science . He also contributes to the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (including article Augustin-Louis Cauchy ). In the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1990 he wrote the section on the history of mathematics in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Frazer has been married to Alison Jean Brannen since 1986 and the couple have a daughter, Amanda Elizabeth.

Fonts

• The Cosmos: a historical perspective , Greenwood Publishers 2006
• with Sandro Capparini: Mechanics in the Eighteenth Century , Chapter 9 in: Jed Z. Buchwald, Robert Fox (Ed.), Oxford Companion to the History of Physics. Oxford University Press, 2013
• History of Mathematics in the Eighteenth Century , in Roy Porter (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 4: Eighteenth-Century Science, Cambridge University Press , 2003, pp. 305-327
• The Calculus of Variations: A Historical Survey, in: Hans Niels Jahnke (Ed.), A History of Analysis, American Mathematical Society, 2003, pp. 355-384. (previously in German in: Jahnke, Geschichte der Analysis, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag 1999)
• Calculus and Analytical Mechanics in the Age of Enlightenment . Ashgate, Aldershot 1997

Articles (selection)

• with Michiyo Nakane: The Early History of Hamilton-Jacobi Theory , Centaurus , 44, 2003, pp. 161–227
• The origins of Euler’s variational calculus , Archive for History of Exact Sciences , 47, 1994, pp. 103-141
• Isoperimetric Problems in the Variational Calculus of Euler and Lagrange, Historia Mathematica , 19, 1992, pp. 4-23
• Mathematical Technique and Physical Conception in Euler's Investigation of the Elastica , Centaurus, 34, 1991, pp. 24-60
• The Calculus as Algebraic Analysis: Some Observations on Mathematical Analysis in the 18th Century, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 39, 1989, pp. 317-335
• Joseph Louis Lagrange's Algebraic Vision of the Calculus, Historia Mathematica, 14, 1987, pp. 38-53
• JL Lagrange’s Changing Approach to the Foundations of the Calculus of Variations, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 32, 1985, pp. 151–191
• D'Alembert ’s Principle: The Original Formulation and Application in Jean D’Alembert’s "Traité de Dynamique" (1743) , Part 1,2, Centaurus, 28, 1985, pp. 31-61 & 145-159
• JL Lagrange's Early Contributions to the Principles and Methods of Mechanics, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 28, 1983, pp. 197-241

Web links

• University of Toronto