I

The Relevance of the Past

History is the most fundamental science, for there is no human knowledge which cannot lose its scientific character when men forget the conditions under which it originated, the questions which it answered, and the function it was created to serve.

—Benjamin Farrington, Irish writer, classicist, author of Greek Science1

 

I am sure that no subject loses more than mathematics by any attempt to dissociate it from its history.

—James Whitbread Lee Glaisher, English mathematician, astronomer, editor of the Messenger of Mathematics (inspiration for the American Mathematical Society)2