Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Joseph W. Dauben is Distinguished Professor of History and History of Science at the City University of New York. He is the author of biographies of Georg Cantor and Abraham Robinson, and most recently, a three-volume Chinese-English dual-language edition of the ancient Chinese classic, The Nine Chapters on the Art of Mathematics (2013), written in collaboration with Guo Shuchun and Xu Yibao. He is a 1966 graduate of CMC where he majored in mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University.  His areas of interest and research include history of science, history of mathematics; the scientific revolution; sociology of science; intellectual history, 17-18th centuries; history of Chinese science; and history of botany.

Dauben started out as a historian of mathematics with a focus on the modern period in Europe and America. His most famous publication from this part of his career is Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite, a highly regarded biography that covers both Cantor's contributions to mathematics, notably set theory and the theory of the infinite, his life, and his theological and philosophical ideas. Dauben then developed an expertise in Chinese mathematics, even learning to speak Chinese, mentoring Chinese students, and publishing on classical and modern mathematics in China. 

A recipient of many international prestigious awards including delivering an invited lecture at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin on Karl Marx's mathematical work, Dauben became an honorary member of the Institute for History of Natural Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2002. In January of 2012 he received the American Mathematical Society’s Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize for History of Mathematics.

View Video: YouTube with Joseph Dauben '66