JSTOR All-Stars: "History of Mathematics Before the Seventeenth Century"

July 3, 2007

The JSTOR database is an archive of important scholarly journals, offering researchers high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages. It now includes 37,094 articles from The American Mathematical Monthly, from 1894 to 2003. The 1949 article "History of Mathematics Before the Seventeenth Century" by Raymond Clare Archibald ranks as the fourth most frequently accessed Monthly article in the database.

"History of Mathematics Before the Seventeenth Century"
Raymond Clare Archibald
The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (January, 1949), pp. 7-34

Based on the first of a series of lectures on the history of mathematics, this article spans a period of about 4700 years, starting with Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics and astronomy. It concludes with a brief account of the work of 16th-century French mathematician François Vieta.

The top three Monthly articles are:

1. "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage" by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley, Vol. 69, No. 1 (January, 1962), pp. 9-15.
2. "Introduction to Fermat's Last Theorem" by David A. Cox, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January, 1994), pp. 3-14.
3. "Period Three Implies Chaos" by Tien-Yien Li and James A Yorke, Vol. 82, No. 10 (December, 1975), pp. 985-992.

Access to the JSTOR archive is provided by many college, university, and other libraries. To find out if your library is a JSTOR participant, use one of the following links:
United States: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_na.html.
Other Countries: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_intl.html.

If your library is not on one of the above lists, look for a nearby library that does have JSTOR access and is open to the public. Members of the MAA have the option of purchasing an individual subscription to JSTOR that gives them access to the archives of The American Mathematical Monthly, Mathematics Magazine, and The College Mathematics Journal.