Henk J. M. Bos

Henk January Maarten Bos ( born 1940 ) is a Dutch historian of mathematics

Bos received his doctorate in 1973 at the University of Utrecht in Hans Freudenthal on Leibniz ( differential, higher-order differentials and the derivative in the Leibnizian calculus ). He was until his retirement in 2005 Professor of History of Mathematics at the University of Utrecht. Since 2008 he teaches with an honorary professorship at the University of Aarhus in the Faculty of History of Science. In 2009 he was a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Bos focused in particular on the history of science of the 17th century, among other things, Christian Huygens ( whose article in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, he wrote ), René Descartes and the beginnings of the development of analysis in Leibniz Next he dealt among other things with Jean- Victor Poncelet and the closing sentence of Poncelet.

In 2005 he was awarded the Kenneth O. May Prize. In 1985 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Berkeley ( The concept of construction and the representation of curves in seventeenth -century mathematics ).

His doctoral counts Erhard Scholz ( University of Bonn, 1979).

He is married to the Danish professor of mathematics history in Aarhus Kirsti Andersen.

Writings

• Redefining Geometrical Exact Ness: Descartes ' Transformation of the Early Modern Concept of Construction, Springer 2001
• Lectures in the history of mathematics, American Mathematical Society 1993, 1997
• Publisher with M.J.S. Rudwick, H.A.M. Snelders, R.P.W. Visser: Studies on Christiaan Huygens (Invited papers from the symposium on the life and work of Christiaan Huygens, Amsterdam, 22 to 25 August 1979), Lisse, Swets and Zeitlinger, 1980 ( in Bos: Huygens and Mathematics ).
• Published by Herbert Mehrtens, Ivo Schneider: Social history of nineteenth century mathematics, Boston, Birkhauser, 1981.
• With Karin Reich: The double prelude to early modern algebra: Viète and Descartes in Erhard Scholz (Editor ) History of algebra, BI Publisher 1990