Evert Marie Bruins

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Evert Marie Bruins (born January 4, 1909 in Woudrichem ; † November 20, 1990 in Amsterdam ) was a Dutch physicist , mathematician and mathematician .

biography

Bruins attended grammar school in Amsterdam, where he learned Latin and Greek, and studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the University of Amsterdam , where he became an assistant for experimental physics . He dealt with geomagnetism under Jacob Clay and took part in a research expedition on the Boskoop in the North Sea, the South Atlantic and the Pacific in the mid-1930s . He examined radiation in the atmosphere and discovered the Van Allen Belt in his dissertation (1938, cum laude ) , which, however, received little international attention due to the Second World War, which soon broke out. In 1935 he was Vice Director of the Institute for Physics (Natuurkundig Labor) at the University of Amsterdam and also taught mathematics after moving to the Mathematics Faculty during the Second World War. There, after a teaching assignment in analysis, he received a lectureship in applied mathematics, which he kept until 1969. 1952 to 1954 and 1955/56 he was visiting professor of mathematics at the University of Baghdad and founded the Institute of Mathematics there. There he could also pursue his interest in mathematical cuneiform texts . In 1969 he became professor for the history of mathematics in Amsterdam. In 1979 he retired.

He dealt mainly with Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek mathematics (and mastered the corresponding languages ​​and scripts). He also had knowledge of Arabic, Russian and a number of European languages.

With Marguerite Rutten he edited Textes mathématiques de Suse (mathematical cuneiform texts from Susa ) in 1961 , and in 1964 he published the Codex Constantinopolitanus Palatii Veteris , which contains the only surviving text of the Metrica of Heron of Alexandria (on his way back from Baghdad he was in Istanbul photographed the manuscript).

As a mathematician historian, he used his mental arithmetic skills and his knowledge of numerical methods to reconstruct the algorithmic procedure in ancient hieroglyphic or cuneiform texts and loved to challenge other interpretations such as that of Otto Neugebauer , which occasionally led to controversies in which he passionately expressed his opinion represented. For example, he was of the opinion that a skilled Egyptian calculator could compile the well-known tables of converting fractions of form to sums of parent fractions of form (which the Egyptians used for rational numbers) in a day, instead of taking the long time it is commonly believed to do . One of his original contributions was that he saw the beginnings of non-Euclidean geometry in Zeno of Sidon . This was rejected by Kurt von Fritz , among others .

He had extensive correspondence and traveled extensively.

Bruins was from 1957 co-editor and from 1963 sole editor of the magazine Janus , which stopped its publication after his death.

As a mathematician, he dealt a lot with the invariant theory of Roland Weitzenböck, who was influential in the Netherlands, and also with non-Euclidean geometry.

His only doctoral student was Yvonne Dold-Samplonius .

Fonts

  • with M. Rutten: Textes mathématiques de Suse, Mémoires de la mission archéologique en Iran, 34, Paris 1961
  • Codex Constantinopolitanus Palatii Veteris, 3 volumes, Leiden 1964
  • Fontes mathesos. Hoofdpunten van het prae-griekse en griekse wiskundig Think, Leiden 1953
  • Interpretation of cuneiform mathematics, Physis, Volume 4, 1962, pp. 277-341
  • Niet-Euclidische euclidische meetkunde, Euclides, Volume 39, 1963, pp. 1-15
  • La géométrie non-euclidéenne dans la antiquité, Paris, Publ.Université de Paris, 1968

literature

  • Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, p. 383
  • Eberhard Knobloch, Obituary in Historia Mathematica, Volume 18, 1991, pp. 381–389 (with bibliography by Jan P. Hogendijk )
  • E. Knobloch, JP Hogendijk: Evert Marie Bruins (1909-1990), Arch. Int. Hist. Sci., Vol. 42, 1992, pp. 317-319

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bruins, Ancient egyptian arithmetic: 2 / N, Indagationes Mathematicae, Volume 14, 1952, pp. 81-91
  2. ↑ Independently, from 1966 onwards, Imre Tóth also believed to have found indications of the knowledge of non-Euclidean geometry among the Greeks in Aristotle's work
  3. ↑ Article Zenon of Sidon in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
personal data
SURNAME Bruins, Evert Marie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch physicist, mathematician and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Woudrichem
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1990
Place of death Amsterdam