Florian Cajori was born February 28, 1859 in St Aignan (near Thusis), Graubünden, Switzerland. He emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. He received a Ph.D. at Tulane University, where he taught for a few years before being driven north by his health. He taught at Colorado College, where he founded the Colorado College Scientific Society. He became one of the most celebrated historians of mathematics in his day (he was the author of "A History of Mathematical Notations" (ISBN 0486677664)). In 1918, he was appointed to a specially created chair in history of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in Berkeley, California until his death, August 15, 1930.
External Links:
[Colorado College (http://www.cc.colorado.edu/Dept/MA/History/Faculty/Cajori.html)] page on Florian Cajori.
Cajori held the chair of mathematics at Colorado College from 1898 until 1918, being Dean of the Department of Engineering for the last fifteen years of his time at Colorado Springs.
We must now examine a little of the contribution which Cajori made to the history of mathematics to understand his high international reputation in the subject which gained him many honours in his lifetime but the somewhat less regard in which he is held by historians of science today.
Cajori makes very clear his aim in producing this edition of Newton's Principia which was to make the text readable to modern readers by replacing the archaic language used in the existing English translations of Newton's Latin text.
Inwardly Cajori would have found it particularly tiresome as he knew he would have to print this interpretation in the series of Colorado College Studies which he had founded thirteen years before, and whose academic standards he was attempting to keep high.
CajoriÂ’s final years at the College must have been the most painful and stressful of his career, though that was nothing to do with the students.
CajoriÂ’s leaving provoked one of the most moving editorials to have appeared in the Tiger, the Colorado College Newspaper of the time.
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