Kenneth May

Kenneth Ownsworth May (born July 8, 1915 in Portland (Oregon) , † December 1, 1977 in Toronto ) was an American mathematical historian and mathematical economist.

Live and act

May studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley , where his father was a professor of administration. In 1937 he got his master’s degree there, took an interest in statistics and government planning, and became a member of the Communist Party. He visited the Soviet Union in 1937 and then studied further at the London School of Economics with Ronald Aylmer Fisher and in Paris at the Sorbonne . In 1939 he visited the Soviet Union again. In 1940 he was back in Berkeley to do his doctorate, where he was forced out of the university because of his communist activities (and disinherited by his father, but they were reconciled after the war). During the war he served as a paratrooper and received his doctorate in Berkeley in 1946 ( On the mathematical theory of employment ). He then became an assistant professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and began to be interested in the history of mathematics.

In 1966 he became professor of mathematical history at the University of Toronto .

With René Taton and Adolf Pawlowitsch Juschkewitsch , he initiated the establishment of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM) in 1971, which he chaired. He was also the editor and co-founder of their journal Historia Mathematica in 1974. May also wrote a series of portraits of mathematicians for Canadian television in 1970.

The ICHM's Kenneth O. May Prize is awarded in his honor to mathematicians.

Craig Fraser (Professor in Toronto) is one of his PhD students .

Fonts

• Article Carl Friedrich Gauss. In: Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 5, pp. 298-315, 1972
• with Constance Gardner: World directory of historians of mathematics . 1972, 2nd edition 1978. Additions to this by Christoph Scriba and Sacksteder, Hamburg 1985, 3rd edition, Aarhus 1995.
• Bibliography and Research Manual of the History of Mathematics . University of Toronto Press, 1973.

literature

• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (Ed.): Writing the history of mathematics. Its historical development . Birkhäuser, Basel et al. 2002, ISBN 3-7643-6167-0 , ( Science networks 27).