Author: Louis Charles Karpinski

David Eugene Smith (1860-1944) taught at Teachers College, Columbia University, from 1901 until his retirement in 1922 and became one of the leading American historians of mathematics, as well as a determined collector of rare mathematical books and manuscripts that went to Columbia, where they are still consulted. Louis Charles Karpinski (1878-1956) held posts at Columbia, Berea College, and Oswego before settling at the University of Michigan, where he was made full professor in 1919. He wrote on medieval and early modern mathematics, including a study of Robert of Chester's Latin version of al-Khwarizmi's algebra, and on the bibliography of early printed arithmetics. This book was their joint work.