This ebook addresses the historiography of arithmetic because it used to be practiced through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries via paying specified awareness to the cultural contexts within which the heritage of arithmetic was once written.

In the nineteenth century, the background of arithmetic used to be recorded through a various diversity of individuals expert in a variety of fields and pushed via diversified motivations and goals. those backgrounds frequently formed not just their writing at the heritage of arithmetic, yet, in a few cases, have been additionally influential of their next reception.

During the interval from approximately 1880-1940, arithmetic modernized in very important methods, with reference to its content material, its stipulations for cultivation, and its id; and the writing of the historical past of arithmetic performed into the final half in particular.

Parallel to the modernization of arithmetic, the heritage of arithmetic progressively advanced right into a box of study with its personal journals, societies and educational positions. Reflecting either a brand new specialist identification and alterations in its fundamental viewers, a number of shifts of standpoint within the method the historical past of arithmetic used to be and is written can nonetheless be saw to today. firstly targeting significant inner, common advancements in convinced sub-disciplines of arithmetic, the sphere progressively gravitated in the direction of a spotlight on contexts of information creation concerning participants, neighborhood practices, difficulties, groups, and networks.

The objective of this publication is to hyperlink those disciplinary and methodological adjustments within the historical past of arithmetic to the wider cultural contexts of its practitioners, particularly the historians of arithmetic throughout the interval in question.