Augustus De Morgan, Polymath

When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as 'one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom' and even as 'the greatest of our mathematicians'. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan's life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.

This edited collection celebrates De Morgan as a polymath. Drawing together multiple elements of his activity from a range of publications and archives, its contributors re-assess his academic work, his place in his intellectual environment, and his legacy. The result offers new insight into De Morgan himself as well as the wider circles in which he moved, including his family life.

Karen Attar is the Curator of Rare Books and University Art at Senate House Library, University of London, and was for many years a Research Fellow at the University's Institute of English Studies. Her publications cover various aspects of book collecting, library history and librarianship. They include several book chapters on Augustus De Morgan's library, which she also reconstituted within the University of London and catalogued. She is best known for the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (3rd edn, 2016).

Adrian Rice is the Dorothy and Muscoe Garnett Professor of Mathematics at Randolph-Macon College, Virginia, USA. He has held visiting positions at the University of Virginia (1998-99) and the University of Oxford (2014-15). His research focuses on the history of mathematics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the work of Augustus De Morgan. Previous books include Mathematics in Victorian Britain, co-edited with Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, co-authored with Christopher Hollings and Ursula Martin (Bodleian Library, 2018).

Christopher Stray is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History, Heritage and Classics at Swansea University. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2012), Beinecke Library, Yale University (2005), and a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge (1996-98). His principal research interests are the history of classical scholarship and teaching, particularly at the university level; his essay collection Classics in Britain, 1800-2000 was published by Clarendon Press in 2018. He has recently contributed to collaborative projects on William Whewell, Robert Leslie Ellis and Charles Babbage, and his edition of J.M.F. Wright's 1827 undergraduate memoir Alma Mater; or, Seven Years at the University of Cambridge appeared with University of Exeter Press in 2023.