====================== HES POSTING ====================== Participants in this thread may be interested in an exactly parallel set of discussions a few years ago among historians of mathematics. The eminent Joseph W. Dauben responded to Andre Weil's 1988 Helsinki International Congress talk which suggested that "The craft of mathematical history can best be practiced by those of us who are or who have been active mathematicians", or as Dauben says "...only mathematicians like [Weil] himself were qualified to write history of mathematics, and the better the mathematician, the better the history was likely to be ..." [pace Paul Samuelson on Whig History(?)] See Dauben's "Mathematics: An Historian's Perspective" in Chikara, Mitsuo, and Dauben, (eds.) _The Intersection of History and Mathematics_ .Boston: Birkhauser, 1994. E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics Director, Center for Social and Historical Studies of Science Duke University, Box 90097 Durham, North Carolina 27708-0097 Phone and voicemail: (919) 660-1838 Fax: (919) 684-8974 E-mail: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html ================ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ================ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]