Conference Report 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas: Exchange and Influence from Late Babylonian Mathematics to Early Renaissance Science

Organizers: Joseph W. Dauben (New York) and Yvonne Dold (Heidelberg)

Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study and Conference Center (Italy)

May 8-12, 2000

The purpose of the Bellagio conference was to bring together an international team of scholars, some of whom had worked together before, to allow thorough discussion of the transmission of mathematics between cultures across Europe and Asia.  During an intensive week of lectures and discussion, participants focused their attention on early mathematical works, especially those in China, India, the Arabic/Islamic world, and the late Middle Ages/Renaissance in Europe, in order to explore evidence of direct and indirect influences, possible connections, and various means by which the problems or methods devised in one particular place and time found their way to other points, often very far apart in place and time.

The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Conference Center, the Villa Serbelloni, provided a quiet, reflective atmosphere in which we were able to accomplish a substantial amount of work in a relatively short period of time.  In the course of seven morning and afternoon sessions, twenty-one studies were presented and discussed in detail by the group.

The list of participants with the titles of their contributions can be found at http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/transmath.

In response to the comments and suggestions made during the course of the meeting, the papers prepared for the Bellagio conference will be further revised over the next few months.  This proceedings will appear as a volume of Boethius, a series published by Steiner Verlag in Stuttgart, Germany. The Editorial Board is comprised of Joseph W. Dauben, New York, Yvonne Dold-Samplonius, Heidelberg, and Menso Folkerts, Munich.

Written by Yvonne Dold-Samplonius