JSTOR All-Stars: "Hypatia and Her Mathematics"

October 18, 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 1994 article "Hypatia and Her Mathematics" by Michael A.B. Deakin ranks as the eighth most frequently accessed Monthly article in the database.

"Hypatia and Her Mathematics"
Michael A.B. Deakin
The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 101, No. 3 (March 1994), pp. 234-243

"The first woman mathematician of whom we have reasonably secure and detailed knowledge is Hypatia of Alexandria. Although there is a considerable amount of material available about her, very much of that is fanciful, tendentious, unreferenced or plain wrong." This article directs the reader's attention to the best accessible sources and describes what is known about her mathematical activities.

The top seven 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.
  4. "History of Mathematics Before the Seventeenth Century" by Raymond Clare Archibald, Vol. 56, No. 1 (January, 1949), pp. 7-34.
  5. "Galois Theory for Beginners" by John Stillwell, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January, 1994), pp. 22-27.
  6. "Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?" by Mark Kac, Vol. 73, No. 4 (April 1966), pp. 1-23.
  7. "Mathematics and Sex" by John Ernest, Vol. 83, No. 8 (October 1966), pp. 595-614.

New Features at the JSTOR Archive.

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