Ivor Grattan-Guinness obituary

When Ivor Grattan-Guinness, who has died aged 73 of heart failure, became interested in the history of mathematics in the 1960s, it was an area of study widely considered to be irrelevant to mathematics proper, or something that older mathematicians did on retirement. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he found that mathematics was presented drily, with no inkling of the original motivations behind its development. So Ivor set himself the task of asking “What happened in the past?” – as opposed, he said, to taking the heritage viewpoint of asking “How did we get here?”

One of his earliest subjects was the 19th-century French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, who developed Fourier analysis, a powerful tool for the exploration of wave motion. Fourier was a revolutionary activist, went to Egypt as a scientific adviser to Napoleon, and was involved in various complications with the emperor after his return to France. Joseph Fourier, 1768-1830: A Survey of His Life and Work (written with Jerome R Ravetz, 1972) was followed by a large three-volume work, Convolutions in French Mathematics 1800-1840 (1990).

Ivor was alive to the possibilities of working up topical subjects from unusual angles as international history meetings appeared on the horizon. In 2012, the year that saw the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, for example, he researched Max Newman, Turing’s mentor at Cambridge and Manchester, for a paper on mathematics and logic for a conference entitled How the World Computes, at Cambridge.

This interest in logic had led Ivor to study Georg Cantor, the creator of the theory of sets, and inevitably to Bertrand Russell. He delved into primary sources and was one of the few who tried to understand the difficult detail of Russell and AN Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which attempted to derive all mathematics from logical principles. (Ivor looked like Russell, and could give a faithful imitation of Russell’s rather strangulated speech.) The history of this strand of inquiry, brought to a close by Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in 1931, was detailed in Ivor’s book The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870-1940 (2000).

Ivor also edited large-scale publications: From the Calculus to Set Theory 1630-1910 (1980), The Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences (2003) and Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940 (2005). When the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) was being revised, he was a natural choice as associate editor for mathematics and statistics. His energy was phenomenal – in addition to publishing a great number of historical articles, he sometimes conducted original investigations into mathematical matters.

He rescued the moribund journal Annals of Science, founded the journal History and Philosophy of Logic, and was on the board of Historia Mathematica from its inception. A member of the council of the Society for Psychical Research, he wrote Psychical Research: A Guide to Its History (1982). In 1971 the British Society for the History of Mathematics was founded: Ivor served as its president (1986-88) and instituted a formal constitution.

Born in Bakewell, Derbyshire, Ivor was the son of Gerald Grattan-Guinness, a mathematics teacher in Bakewell and then deputy director of education in Huddersfield, and his wife Helena (nee Brown). From Huddersfield New college, Ivor went to Wadham College, Oxford (1959-62) as a scholar and gained a degree in mathematics. He attended the London School of Economics as a part-time student of the philosophy of science and gained an MSc (1966), a PhD (1969) and DSc (1978).

In 1965 he married Enid Neville. After a brief employment with the defence manufacturer Marconi, from 1964 Ivor taught on the mathematics for business degree course at Enfield College of Technology, north London, while pursuing his own researches. When, in 1973, the college became Middlesex Polytechnic, and 19 years later Middlesex University, Ivor was encouraged to take on doctoral students, of whom I was his first. Though not a person for long discussions, he was always supportive. In 1993 he was appointed professor of the history of mathematics and logic, and in the festschrift that followed his retirement in 2002, its editor, John Dawson, pointed to his central role in making “the combined field of history and philosophy of logic a recognised and lively area of research”.

Ivor loved music of almost all genres, played the piano to a high standard and sang in choirs with Enid. Their home in Bengeo, Hertford, was a haven for visiting scholars from all over the world, and Ivor continued his researches until the final weeks of his life.

He is survived by Enid.