Judith Grabiner
Quick Facts
Biography
Judith Victor Grabiner (born 1938) is an American mathematician who is among the best-known historians of mathematics. Her main interests are in mathematics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Professional career
She earned her B.S. in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1960 and her M.A. (1962) and Ph.D. (1966) in the history of science at Harvard University, and is currently Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor of Mathematics at Pitzer College. She previously taught at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Her book The Origins of Cauchy's Rigorous Calculus explores the background in which the limit definition was developed. Another book on the work of Joseph Louis Lagrange discusses related material.
Personal life
She is married to fellow mathematician Sandy Grabiner of Pomona College.
Awards and honors
She was an invited speaker, section teaching of mathematics, at the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians, in Berkeley.
She was a recipient of the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award in 1984, 1989, and 1996.
She won the MAA's Lester R. Ford Award in 1984, 1998, 2005, and 2010.
In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
In 2014, she was awarded the Beckenbach Book Prize.
Selected publications
- Grabiner, Judith V. (1981). The Origins of Cauchy's Rigorous Calculus. Dover (reprint); orig. MIT Press. viii+252 p. ISBN 0-486-43815-5.
- Grabiner, Judith V. (2010). A Historian Looks Back: The Calculus as Algebra and Selected Writings. MAA Spectrum. MAA. pp. xv+287 p. ISBN 978-0-88385-572-0.
- Waterhouse, William C. (1982). "Review: The origins of Cauchy's rigorous calculus, by Judith V. Grabiner; and Équations différentielles ordinaires: Ordinary differential equations, by Augustin Louis Cauchy" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 7 (3): 634–638. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1982-15075-3.