Customer Reviews

History of Mathematics: From a Mathematician's Vantage Point

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Consider a brief and somewhat controversial passage from Morris Kline's "Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times" (occuring on pg. 23):

"[T]he Egyptians and Babylonians were crude carpenters, whereas the Greeks were magnificent architects. One does find more favorable, even laudatory, descriptions of the Babylonian and Egyptian achievements. But these are made by specialists who become, perhaps unconsciously, overimpressed by their own field of interest."

Compare this with a passage appearing on page 149 of the new AMS publication, "History of Mathematics from a Mathematician's Vantage Point", written (according to the book's cover) by Nicolaos Artemiadis.

"[T]he Egyptians and the Babylonians were "clumsy carpenters" while the Greeks were "magnificent architects". Of course, there exist historians who gave a more favorable judgment regarding the achievements of the Babylonians and the Egyptians. But these judgments were made by specialists who were perhaps unconsciously impressed more than necessary by the object of their interest."

The title page of Artemiadis' book explains that it is an English translation of a book originally published in Greek in the year 2000. The title page neglects, however, to mention that the ostensibly original Greek text is largely a translation of an English history - Morris Kline's "Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times". Morris Kline is given no credit whatsoever in the body of Artemiadis' text (apart from being listed in the bibliography), despite the fact that he wrote much of it. Although the translation and retranslation process has altered many of Kline's individual words, even a superficial inspection reveals that sentences, paragraphs, and even whole pages of Artemiadis' writings are clearly isomorphic to passages in Kline's classic history. To put matters bluntly, "History of Mathematics from a Mathematician's Vantage Point" is a work of blatant plagiarism.

I have occasionally joked with students that "if you must cheat, at least have the good sense to cheat well." Apparently, Artemiadis never heard this advice. Rather than playing it safe and stealing from an obscure source, he chose to pilfer prose from a standard history of mathematics familiar to most mathematicians. Still worse, he made the mistake of plagiarizing the writings of a highly literate iconoclast whose ideas are easily identifiable both by their novelty and by their very phrasing.

Morris Kline, incidentally, is not the only victim, though he is the most conspicuous. If nothing else, many readers will recognize the chronological table which appears in the back of "History of Mathematics from a Mathematician's Vantage Point" as a slightly abbreviated version of the table appearing in Carl Boyer's, "A History of Mathematics".

This is an appalling book - the sort of thing one hears about, but rarely actually holds in one's hands (in an AMS publication no less! How did this get by the editors?) The idea that this inept thievery is supposed to represent the "mathematician's viewpoint" only adds insult to injury.