Wikipedia:Rouse History of Mathematics

One of Wikipedia's public domain resources!

There are a series of articles transcribed by Dr. David R. Wilkins (dwilkins@maths.tcd.ie) School of Mathematics Trinity College, Dublin at http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/

They all start with a line:

From `A Short Account of the History of Mathematics' (4th edition, 1908) by W. W. Rouse Ball.

Are they fair game to grab as source material for our wikipedia? I know we are scarfing stuff from the 1911 encyclopedia, this is from 1908, so it should be under the same lack of restrictions.... - .... discussion about sending an email, email is written, time elapses ... - Dr Wilkins just responeded. (10-2-01) Here's the reply Dear Sirs,

My apologies for delaying overlong on the response to your e-mails regarding Rouse Ball's History of Mathematics. My excuse is that they were sent to me in August, at a time when I was away from Dublin for a few months, and I never got round to the task of dealing fully with over a thousand e-mails that awaited me on my return.

In reply to your specific query:

Walter William Rouse Ball lived from 14 Aug 1850 to 4 April 1925.

You will find these dates on the MacTutor History of Mathematics website, specifically at

http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ball.html

You will note that Rouse Ball has been dead for over 70 years, and therefore his works would therefore have entered the public domain under EU copyright law and international copyright conventions.

I have not recently made the effort to double-check these dates, through you should be able to find an entry for Rouse Ball in some dictionary of scientific biography.

I do recall, though, that, when the duration of copyright was lengthened from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author, I did do my own check and found that Rouse Ball had been dead for just over 70 years; this would have been around 1995/6.

The copy I have used has the following information on its title page:

A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS BY W. W. ROUSE BALL FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

FOURTH EDITION

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1908

and, over the page

First Edition 1888. Second Edition 1893. Third Edition 1901. Fourth Edition 1908.

Of course, with a book of this age, any copyright in the `typographical arrangement' under British and Irish copyright law would have lapsed long ago: such copyright lasts for at most 50 years (under the most recent Irish legislation), and in any case such copyright is only violated by `reprographic' copies, made for example with a photocopying machine, or photographically.

If you are intending to quote, I seriously advise you to consult a printed text, to ensure accuracy of the quote. You might note that the edition that I have used has also been photographically reproduced by Dover Publications.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. David Wilkins, School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. sounds good, no? --E

-

These are great! I'll kick things off by putting a tracking index here:

Mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W. W. Rouse Ball (4th Edition, 1908).

see http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/RBallIndex.html

''The following list, it appears, is not actively maintained. Use to put a credit in an usual manner." -- Taku 00:31, 15 September 2005 (UTC)''

''By judging from red links (their absence), all entries that can be used to create stubs have been imported. -- Taku 01:06, 15 September 2005 (UTC)''
 * Maybe so, but I bet a fair number were created from other sources. It's worth checking the Rouse entry for each. 207.74.176.195


 * André-Marie Ampère (1775 - 1836) status: not done
 * François Jean Dominique Arago (1786 - 1853) status: initial page version copied
 * Antoine Arbogast (1759 - 1803) status: imported single sentence in its entirety to create tiny article
 * Charles Babbage (1792 - 1871) status: appended Rouse text to article, not merged yet
 * Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac (1581 - 1638) status: imported text
 * Isaac Barrow (1630 - 1677) status: imported and reformatted: needs proofreading
 * Daniel Bernoulli (1700 - 1782) status: dumped text into existing article, with a few words tweaked for flow. Needs formatting and editing.
 * James Bernoulli (1654 - 1705) status: not done
 * John Bernoulli (1667 - 1748) status: not done
 * Étienne Bézout (1730 - 1783) status: imported text, reformatted
 * Jean Baptiste Biot (1774 - 1862) status: not done
 * William, Viscount Brouncker (1620 - 1684) status: not done
 * Lazare Nicholas Marguerite Carnot (1753 - 1823) status: copied text, not wikified yet
 * Sadi Carnot (1796 - 1832) status: copied text, not merged yet
 * Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598 - 1647) status: not done
 * Henry Cavendish (1731 - 1810) status: not done
 * Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713 - 1765) status: done
 * John Collins (1625 - 1683) status: not done, disambiguation Stub created
 * Roger Cotes (1682 - 1716) status: not done
 * Gabriel Cramer (1704 - 1752) status: not done
 * Jean-le-Rond D'Alembert (1717 - 1783) status: not done
 * John Dalton (1766 - 1844) status: not done
 * Antoine de Laloubère (1600 - 1664) status: not done
 * Philippe de la Hire (1640 - 1719) status: not done
 * Abraham de Moivre (1667 - 1754) status: not done
 * René Descartes (1596 - 1650) status: not done
 * Humphry Ditton (1675 - 1715) status: not done
 * Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783) status: not done
 * Giulio Carlo, Count Fagnano (1682 - 1766) status: not done
 * Pierre de Fermat (1601 - 1665) status: not done
 * Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830) status: article text copied, not yet reviewed
 * Bernard Frénicle de Bessy (c.1605 - 1670) status: not done
 * Augustin Jean Fresnel (1788 - 1827) status: not done
 * David Gregory (1661 - 1708) status: not done
 * James Gregory (1638 - 1675) status: not done
 * Jean Paul de Gua de Malves (1713 - 1785) status: not done
 * Edmund Halley (1656 - 1742) status: not done
 * Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792 - 1871) status: not done
 * Robert Hooke (1635 - 1703) status: not done
 * Johann Hudde (1633 - 1704) status: not done
 * Christian Huygens (1629 - 1695) status: not done
 * Sir James Ivory (1765 - 1842) status: not done
 * Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736 - 1813) status: copied raw text only
 * Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728 - 1777) status: not done
 * Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827) status: not done
 * Adrien Marie Legendre (1752 - 1833) status: not done
 * Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 - 1716) status: not done
 * Guillaume François Antoine L'Hospital (1661 - 1704) status: not done
 * Colin Maclaurin (1698 - 1746) status: not done
 * Nicholas Mercator (c.1620 - 1687) status: not done
 * Marin Mersenne (1588 - 1648) status: not done
 * Pierre Raymond de Montmort (1678 - 1719) status: text copied in from Rouse
 * Gaspard Monge (1746 - 1818) status: not done
 * Sir Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727) status: not done
 * François Nicole (1683 - 1758) status: not done
 * Antoine Parent (1666 - 1716) status: not done
 * Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) status: not done
 * George Peacock (1791 - 1858) status: not done
 * John Pell (1610 - 1685) status: imported and edited text
 * Johann Friederich Pfaff (1765 - 1825) status: not done
 * Siméon Poisson (1781 - 1840) status: not done
 * Jean Victor Poncelet (1788 - 1867) status: not done
 * Jacopo Francesco, Count Riccati (1676 - 1754) status: not done
 * Gilles Personier de Roberval (1602 - 1675) status: not done
 * Ole Rømer (1644 - 1710) status: not done
 * Michel Rolle (1652 - 1719) status: not done
 * Benjamin Thomson, Count Rumford (1753 - 1815) status: not done
 * Grégoire de Saint-Vincent (1584 - 1667) status: not done
 * Joseph Saurin (1659 - 1737) status: not done
 * Thomas Simpson (1710 - 1761) status: not done
 * François Walther de Sluze (1622 - 1685) status: not done
 * Matthew Stewart (1717 - 1785) status: copied text, wikified just a bit
 * Brook Taylor (1685 - 1731) status: not done
 * Ehrenfried Walther von Tchirnhausen (1631 - 1708) status: not done
 * Evangelista Torricelli (1608 - 1647) status: not done
 * Jean Trembley (1749 - 1811) status: not done
 * Pierre Varignon (1654 - 1722) status: not done
 * Vincenzo Viviani (1622 - 1703) status: not done
 * John Wallis (1616 - 1703) status: imported text
 * Robert Woodhouse (1773 - 1827) status: not done
 * Sir Christopher Wren (1630 - 1723) status: not done
 * Thomas Young (1773 - 1829) status: not done