Glen Van Brummelen

Glen Robert Van Brummelen (born May 20, 1965) is a Canadian historian of mathematics specializing in the history of trigonometry and historical applications of mathematics to astronomy.

Glen Van Brummelen
Van Brummelen holding a t-shirt of Van Brummelen.

He is president of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics,^[1] and was a co-editor of Mathematics and the Historian's Craft: The Kenneth O. May Lectures (Springer, 2005).

He has been involved in the summer program Mathpath since 2004 and is the creator of "Glensheep" and their evolution. ^[2]

Life

Van Brummelen earned his PhD degree from Simon Fraser University in 1993,^[3] and served as a professor of mathematics at Bennington College from 1999 to 2006. He then transferred to Quest University Canada as a founding faculty member. In 2020, he became the dean of the Faculty of Natural and Applied Sciences at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC.^[4]

Glen Van Brummelen has published the first major history in English of the origins and early development of trigonometry, The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry.^[5] His second book, Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry, concerns spherical trigonometry.^[6][7]

In 2016 he received a Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.^[8]

Works

• The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN 9780691129730, OCLC 750691811
• Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 9780691175997, OCLC 988234342
• Trigonometry: A Very Short Introduction; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020 ISBN 9780198814313, OCLC 1101269106
• The Doctrine of Triangles: The History of Modern Trigonometry Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021 ISBN 978-0691179414, OCLC 1201300540