ArgumentThis article gives the background to a public lecture delivered in Hebrew by Edmund Landau at the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925. On the surface, the lecture appears to be a slightly awkward attempt by a distinguished German-Jewish mathematician to popularize a few number-theoretical tidbits. However, quite unexpectedly, what emerges here is Landau's personal blend of Zionism, German nationalism, and the proud ethos of pure, rigorous mathematics – against the backdrop of the situation of Germany (...) after World War I. Landau's Jerusalem lecture thus shows how the Zionist cause was inextricably linked to, and determined by political agendas that were taking place in Europe at that time. The lecture stands in various historical contexts - Landau's biography, the history of Jewish scientists in the German Zionist movement, the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the creation of a modern Hebrew mathematical language. This article provides a broad historical introduction to the English translation, with commentary, of the original Hebrew text. (shrink)

The birth, growth, stabilization and subsequent understanding of a new field of practical and theoretical enquiry is always a conceptual process including several typologies of events, phenomena an...

C.F Gauss’s computational work in number theory attracted renewed interest in the twentieth century due to, on the one hand, the edition of Gauss’s Werke, and, on the other hand, the birth of the digital electronic computer. The involvement of the U.S. American mathematicians Derrick Henry Lehmer and Daniel Shanks with Gauss’s work is analysed, especially their continuation of work on topics as arccotangents, factors of n2 + a2, composition of binary quadratic forms. In general, this strand in Gauss’s reception (...) is part of a more general phenomenon, i.e. the influence of the computer on mathematics and one of its effects, the reappraisal of mathematical exploration. (shrink)