José Babini

José Babini

José Babini (born May 10, 1897 in Buenos Aires , † May 18, 1984 ibid) was an Argentine science historian (history of mathematics and natural sciences) and mathematician.

Babini worked for a construction company, where the owners recognized his mathematical talent and made it possible for him to study. From 1918 he studied in Buenos Aires. In 1921 he graduated as a teacher of natural history and mathematics and in 1922 he received his diploma as a civil engineer. As early as 1917 he contacted the well-known Spanish mathematician Rey Pastor . Instead of working as a civil engineer, he taught mathematics at the Faculty of Industrial Chemistry at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Rosario (Santa Fe) . There he introduced new methods of numerical mathematics and was considered a leading Argentine expert in this field. He then taught at the Faculty of Education (Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación) in Paraná and at the Colegio Nacional y la Escuela Industrial. When Aldo Mieli came to Argentina from Paris in 1938, he and Babini founded the Instituto de Historia y Filosofía de la Ciencia at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Rosario (with the support of Rey Pastor). It existed until 1943. Babini co-edited the magazine Archeion von Mieli and with Mieli the series Panorama general de historia del ciencia in 12 volumes (with Desiderio Papp , with whom he wrote the volume on exact sciences in the 19th century).

He was a major science organizer in Argentina and a member of the national research council CONICET. From 1955 to 1966 he was dean of the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales of the National University in Buenos Aires. In 1957 he was rector and interim director of the newly founded Universidad Nacional del Nordeste. He was also head of the newly founded university publishing house in Argentina, EUDEBA (Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires).

He served on the editorial board of Historical studies in the physical sciences and was a co-founder of Quipu .

Numerous books (69) and essays as well as translations come from him. In particular, he also published the first books on the history of science in Argentina itself.

Fonts

• with J. Rey Pastor : Historia de la matemática, 1953
• Biografía de los infinitamente pequeños, 1957 (biography of the infinitely small)
• Historia sucinta de la matemática, 1953
• Origen y naturaleza de la ciencia, 1947
• Arquímedes, 1948
• Historia de la ciencia argentina, 1951
• La evolución del pensamiento cientifico en la Argentina, 1953
• El saber en la historia, 1971
• El siglo de las luces: ciencia y tecnología, 1971
• Historia de la medicina, 1980

literature

• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, p. 355
• Eduardo L. Ortiz, Lewis Pyenson: José Babini: Matemático e historiador de la ciencia , Llull, Volume 7, 1984, pp. 77-98