Professor Raymond Flood
Raymond Flood has spent most of his
academic life promoting mathematics and computing to adult audiences, mainly
through his position as University Lecturer at Oxford
University, in the Continuing
Education Department and at Kellogg
College. In parallel he
has worked extensively on the history of mathematics, producing many books and
writing diverse educational material.
He
is Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford,
having been Vice-President of the College and President of the British Society
for the History of Mathematics before retiring in 2010. He is a graduate of
Queen’s University, Belfast; Linacre College, Oxford; and University College, Dublin where he obtained his PhD.
He
enjoys communicating mathematics and its history to non-specialist audiences,
as he has done recently on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and on transatlantic voyages with the
QM2. Two of the most recent books with which he has been involved are The
Great Mathematicians, which
celebrates the achievements of the great mathematicians in their historical
context, and Mathematics in Victorian
Britain, which assembles into a single resource research on the
history of mathematicians that would otherwise be out of reach of the general
reader.
His
first year of lectures as Gresham
Professor of Geometry will
be on Shaping Modern Mathematics:
The 19th Century saw the development of a
mathematics profession with people earning their living from teaching,
examining and researching and with the mathematical centre of gravity moving
from France to Germany. A lot
of the mathematics taught at university today was initiated at that time. Whereas
in the 18th Century
one would use the term mathematician, by the end of the 19th Century one had specialists in analysis,
algebra, geometry, number theory, probability and
statistics, and applied mathematics. This series of free
public lectures looks at the shaping of each of these mathematical areas and at
the people who were involved.
In
the succeeding years he will choose topics illustrating how mathematics has
developed more recently and, in particular, what mathematics can, cannot, and
hopes to achieve.
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