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De Morgan, Periodicals and Encyclopaedias

Olivier Bruneau(author)

Chapter of: Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy(pp. 82–105)

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Title	De Morgan, Periodicals and Encyclopaedias
Contributor	Olivier Bruneau(author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0408.04
Landing page	https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0408/chapters/10.11647/obp.0408.04
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Copyright	Olivier Bruneau
Publisher	Open Book Publishers
Published on	2024-09-04
Long abstract	Through his many books and publications in various periodicals, Augustus De Morgan was a disseminator of mathematics, particularly to the general public. An active member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded by the same people who established University College London, De Morgan was also a great promoter of mathematics via its publications. The most striking example is his significant involvement as a contributor to the Penny Cyclopaedia (27 vols., 1833-1843), for which he authored more than 700 articles on mathematics and astronomy, some of which are very long. In this chapter we propose to contextualise these articles by comparing them with the mathematical production in other encyclopedic works of the time, such as the well-known Encyclopaedia Brittanica (with its several editions), Rees’ Encyclopaedia (1802-1820), the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808-1830) and the Encyclopedia Metropolitana (1845). Through this comparative study, we will give an overview of De Morgan’s scholarly and journalistic output, showing the extent of his writings for a general audience, and revealing him to have been one of early Victorian Britain’s most prolific and gifted mathematical expositors.
Page range	pp. 82–105
Print length	24 pages
Language	English (Original)

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Contributors

Olivier Bruneau

(author)

Associate Professor of Mathematics and its History at University of Lorraine

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2659-4495

Olivier Bruneau is an associate professor of mathematics and its history at the Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France. His research mainly focuses on mathematical circulation in France and Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is particularly interested in the heritage of mathematics through encyclopedias in Great Britain over the same period. He has recently published an article on the heritage markers of mathematics in British encyclopedias between 1704 and 1850 (Philosophia Scientiae, 26(2) (2022), 67-90).

References

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Through his many books and publications in various periodicals, Augustus De Morgan was a disseminator of mathematics, particularly to the general public. An active member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded by the same people who established University College London, De Morgan was also a great promoter of mathematics via its publications. The most striking example is his significant involvement as a contributor to the Penny Cyclopaedia (27 vols., 1833-1843), for which he authored more than 700 articles on mathematics and astronomy, some of which are very long.
In this chapter we propose to contextualise these articles by comparing them with the mathematical production in other encyclopedic works of the time, such as the well-known Encyclopaedia Brittanica (with its several editions), Rees’ Encyclopaedia (1802-1820), the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808-1830) and the Encyclopedia Metropolitana (1845). Through this comparative study, we will give an overview of De Morgan’s scholarly and journalistic output, showing the extent of his writings for a general audience, and revealing him to have been one of early Victorian Britain’s most prolific and gifted mathematical expositors.