This special issue of BSHM Bulletin presents a selection of papers based on those given at the meeting Mathematical Biography: A MacTutor Celebration, held at the University of St Andrews on 16 and 17 September 2016. A report on the meeting is also included in this issue. The meeting celebrated the MacTutor history of mathematics website, developed by John O’Connor and Edmund Robertson, which has become such a valuable resource for the study of the history of mathematics: appropriately, its founders are pictured on the cover of this issue.
The initial idea for the conference came from Jane Wess, who suggested that as the home of MacTutor, St Andrews was the obvious place to discuss issues surrounding the writing and use of mathematical biography. We aimed to showcase various approaches to mathematical biography, bringing together mathematicians, historians, readers, and writers to discuss their perspectives.
The papers here give a good idea of the diversity of the conference. They range from Skiena and Ward's Who's Bigger—who use big data techniques to assess reputations, implicitly problematizing the question of how and why we single out individuals for special attention as the subject of biographies—to Padua's intensely personal account of how she was ‘ambushed’ by Lovelace, Babbage, and the Analytical Engine. Sørensen and Kaufholz both take ‘biography’ itself as a subject of study, the former in a methodological essay on meta-biography, and the latter in a meta-biographic case study of Sofja Kowalewskaja. Two of the articles—Rodriguez's on Frigyes Riesz, and Martin et al.'s on Ada Lovelace—reflect on the change brought about in our understanding when fresh evidence is sought out, while Davis’ brief note draws attention to a growing collection of sources for studying female mathematicians. Finally, Dewar's use of biography in an interdisciplinary course on women and mathematics, and its impact on students’ understanding both of mathematics and of equitable classroom practice, prompts both teaching ideas and some initial answers to why we might choose subjects for biography.
We are grateful to the meeting sponsors, the London Mathematical Society, and the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, who supported many of the speakers. For those of you who missed the meeting, videos of many of the talks are available on the conference website http://www.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/mathbiog/index.shtml.
Isobel Falconer, Guest Editor
This is my last issue as Editor of BSHM Bulletin, and I should like to take this opportunity to record my thanks to the members of the editorial team and to the staff at Taylor and Francis for their help and support. I am delighted that Benjamin Wardhaugh will be the new editor and wish him every success. Finally, I am grateful to all contributors and readers of the Bulletin, who have made editing the journal so rewarding for me.
Tony Mann