The Canadian Society for History
and Philosophy of Mathematics
La Société Canadienne d’Histoire et
de Philosophie des Mathématiques

Kenneth O. May Lecturers and other Invited Speakers

at the Annual CSHPM/SCHPM Meetings

There have been invited speakers at the majority of the CSHPM/SCHPM Annual Meetings, usually in association with the special session topic of that meeting. In most cases, there has been a single, keynote address, but on a few occasions there have been two or more guest speakers. As a memorial to Kenneth O. May, a fund was established in 1977 to raise money to help underwrite the costs of inviting a guest speaker to each meeting, and at the 2002 AGM, the keynote address was officially named the Kenneth O. May Lecture in his honor.

The list below omits any years in which there is no evidence of an invited speaker at the meeting, as well as a few joint meetings with the British Society for History of Mathematics that contained a substantial number of plenary speakers. Also, please note that Mathematics and the Historian's Craft: The Kenneth O. May Lectures, edited by Glen Van Brummelen and Michael Kinyon, contains full versions of twelve lectures from 1990-2003 and is available from Springer.

• 2022 - Emmylou Haffner, "Going to the Source(s) of Sources in Mathematicians' Drafts"

• 2019 - Alexander Jones, "Sexagesimal Mathematics in Babylonian and Greek Mathematics and Astronomy"

• 2018 - Emily Grosholz, "How Number Theory and Logic Benefit from Productive Ambiguity: Gödel, Mazur, Wiles and Macintyre"

• 2017 - William Dunham, "A Tale of Two Series"

• 2016 - James Tappenden, "Frege, Carl Snell and Romanticism: Fruitful Concepts and the `Organic/Mechanical' Distinction"

• 2015 - Karen Hunger Parshall, "We Are Evidently on the Verge of Important Steps Forward: The American Mathematical Community, 1915-1950"

• 2014 - Michael Williams, "John Napier, His Life and Work"

• 2013 - Jeremy Gray, "Henri Poincaré: Mathematician, Physicist, Philosopher"

• 2012 - Andrew Hodges, "What Does Alan Turing Tell Us About the History of Science?"

• 2010 - Hardy Grant, "Mathematics and the Liberal Arts: The Beginnings"

• 2009 - Jeremy Gray, "Mathematics, Motion, and Truth: the Earth Goes Round the Sun"

• 2008 - Glen Van Brummelen, "In Search of Vanishing Subjects: The Study of Trigonometry before `Trigonometry'"

• 2007 - C. Edward Sandifer, "Five Pearls of Euler"

• 2006 - Chandler Davis, "If It's Real How Can It be Certain"

• 2005 - J. L. Berggren, "Currents and Counter-Currents in the History of Mathematics in Medieval Islam"

• 2003 - Jim Bennett, "Geometry, Instruments and Navigation: Agendas for Research, 1500-1800" [Note: While Jim Bennett gave the Kenneth O. May Lecture, another invited speaker was Lesley Cormack, "The Grounde of Artes: Robert Recorde and the Role of the Muscovy Company in an English Mathematical Renaissance"]

• 2002 - Ivor Grattan-Guinness, "History or Heritage? Historians and Mathematicians on the History of Mathematics" [Note: In addition to his own paper, Grattan-Guinness also read a paper by Albert Lewis, "Kenneth O. May and Information Retrieval"]

• 2001 - Jean Dhombres, "The Applied Mathematics Origins of Lebesgue Integration Theory and Why it was Read as Pure Mathematics During the First Years of the 20th Century"

• 2000 - Rüdiger Thiele, "Hilbert and his 24 Problems"

• 1998 - Volker Peckhaus, "19th Century Logic: Between Philosophy and Mathematics"

• 1997 - Rüdiger Thiele, "The Mathematics and Science of Leonhard Euler"

• 1996 - Alexander Jones, "Greek Applied Mathematics"

• 1995 - Joseph W. Dauben, "Cantor and the Epistemology of Set Theory"

• 1994 - Thomas Archibald (with co-author Louis Charbonneau), "Mathematics in Eastern British North America in the Nineteenth Century: Some Preliminary Remarks"and Karen Hunger Parshall, "The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community 1876-1900"

• 1993 - Stuart Shanker, "Turing and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence"

• 1992 - Michael Closs, "The Ancient Maya: Mathematics and Mathematicians"

• 1991 - Ann Hibner Koblitz, "Women in Mathematics: Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives"

• 1990 - Judith Grabiner, "Was Newton's Calculus a Dead End? A New Look at the Calculus of Colin Maclaurin"

• 1989 - Joan L. Richards, "Rigor and Revolution"

• 1988 - Helena Pycior, title unknown [Note: the program for the 1988 Annual Meeting does not contain the title, although the November 1988 Bulletin does state that it dealt with "Charles Darwin's relationship with mathematics"]

• 1986 - Nathan S. Mendelsohn, "The Unusual Teaching Methods of Samuel Beatty" and Gregory H. Moore, "From Frege to Skolem: The Rise of First-Order Logic"

• 1985 - Albert Lewis, "Bertrand Russell as a Mathematician"

• 1982 - A. John Coleman, "Mathematics in Canada: 1935-1982 Some Anecdotes and Some Dogmatic Opinions" and Carolyn Eisele, "Charles S. Pierce - Mathematician"

• 1980 - Maurice L'Abbé, "Montréal et le développement des mathématiques au Canada et au Québec"

• 1979 - Unknown [Note: The archives contain no program for this meeting, but the 1979 AGM minutes do state that there was an "invited talk."]

• 1978 - Thomas W. Hawkins, "Descartes and the Mathematical Revolution of the 17th Century"

• 1977 - J. Dieudonné, "Recent History of the Theory of Linear Partial Differential Equations"

• 1976 - Asger Aaboe, "The Scientific Foundations of Ancient and Mediaeval Cosmology"

• 1974 - J. L. Berggren, "Archimedes' Contributions to the Development of Statics," Stillman Drake, "Continuity and Discreteness in Early Theories of Free Fall" and H. S. M. Coxeter, "The Space-Time Continuum"