Felix Klein'sEncyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences is a Germanmathematicalencyclopedia published in six volumes from 1898 to 1933. Klein andWilhelm Franz Meyer were organizers of the encyclopedia. Its full title in English isEncyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences Including Their Applications, which isEncyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften mit Einschluss ihrer Anwendungen (EMW). It is 20,000 pages in length (6 volumes,i.e. Bände, published in 23 separate books[1] and was published by B.G. Teubner Verlag, publisher ofMathematische Annalen.
Walther von Dyck acted as chairman of the commission to publish the encyclopedia. In 1904 he contributed a preparatory report on the publication venture in which themission statement is given.
The mission was to present a simple and concise exposition, as complete as possible, of the body of contemporary mathematics and its consequences, while indicating with a detailed bibliography the historical development of mathematical methods from the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The preparatory report (Einleitender Bericht) serves as the Preface for the EMW.In 1908 von Dyck reported on the project to theInternational Congress of Mathematicians in Rome.[2]
Nominally,Wilhelm Franz Meyer was the founder president of the project and assembled volume (Band) 1 (in 2 separate books), "Arithmetic and Algebra", that appeared between 1898 and 1904.D. Selivanov expanded his 20-page article on finite differences in Volume 1, Part 2 into a 92-page monograph published under the titleLehrbuch der Differenzenrechnung.[3]
Volume 3 (in 6 separate books) ongeometry was edited by Wilhelm Franz Meyer.[7] These articles were published between 1906 and 1932 with the bookDifferentialgeometrie published in 1927[8] and the bookSpezielle algebraische Flächen in 1932. Significantly,Corrado Segre contributed an article on "Higher-dimensional space" in 1912 that he updated in 1920. The latter was reviewed byT.R. Hollcroft.[9]
Volume 4 (in 4 separate books) of EMW concernedmechanics, and was edited by Felix Klein andConrad Müller [de].Arnold Sommerfeld edited volume 5 (in 3 separate books) on "Physics", a series that ran until 1927.
Volume 6 consisted of two sections (the geodesy section in 1 book and the astronomy section in 2 separate books):Philipp Furtwängler and E. Weichart coedited "Geodesy and Geophysics", which ran from 1905 to 1922.Karl Schwarzschild andSamuel Oppenheim coedited "Astronomy", publishing until 1933.
In 1905.Alfred Bucherer acknowledged the influence of the encyclopedia onvector notation in the second edition of his book:
When I wrote the first edition of this small work, the discussions and deliberations concerning a uniform symbolism forvector analysis were still in flux. Since that time through the adoption of a suitable method of designation by those working on theEncyklopädie an important system of symbolism has been put forward.[10]
One of the great advantages of this large encyclopedia is that it tends to avoid duplication by establishing a higher minimum of general mathematical knowledge. ... The vastness of the new [mathematical] literature, combined with the fact that some of the new developments appeared first in somewhat obscure places, has often made it difficult for an author to determine whether his results were new. While some of this difficulty remains, yet the large encyclopedia, in which related important results are carefully associated, tends to reduce the difficulty materially.
A tremendous gain of space has been achieved by eliminating much of the discursiveness of the oldEncyklopädie; the great majority of its historical information (which would have been a mere duplication); a large amount of results of secondary importance which needlessly cluttered many articles; and finally, all the parts devoted to astronomy, geodesy, mechanics, and physics which had no significant mathematical content. It has thus been possible to compress into about one-tenth of the bulk of theEncyklopädie a more valuable amount of information on a science which certainly at present is ten times more extensive than it was in 1900.[12]
Despite its age it remains a valuable source of reference, for its period of publication spans one of the most fruitful periods of mathematical research. Noted for its comprehensive treatment and well-documented scholarly articles, it is aimed at the specialist.
In 1982. a history of aeronautics noted the following:
As organizer and editor of the monumentalEncyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences Including Their Applications, [Klein] compiled a collection of definitive studies that became the standard reference inmathematical physics. Early in the thirty-year enterprise Klein solicited the esteemedSebastian Finsterwalder, professor of mathematics at the Munich polytechnic (and incidentally, one of Prandtl's teachers), to write an essay onaerodynamics. This review article is significant in the history of aerodynamics because of its comprehensive scope and because it was submitted in August 1902. The date is more than a year before the Wrights achieved their powered flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and two years before Prandtl introduced his theory of theboundary layer. It is therefore kind of a prenatal record of the science we now call aerodynamics. More to the point, however, it was then a rare compendious account of the state of the art of aerodynamics, a first reference to be found in much subsequent research in the field. Klein's encyclopedia as a whole, moreover, provided the model for the later publication ofAerodynamic Theory, the six-volume encyclopedia of the science of flight thatWilliam F. Durand edited in the mid-1930s...[14]
Many of the articles were the first of their kind on their topic, and several are still the last or the best. Some of them have excellent information on the deeper historical background. This is especially true of articles on applied mathematics, includingengineering, which was stressed in its title.
He also wrote, "The mathematicians at Berlin, the other main mathematical pole in Germany and a citadel forpure mathematics, were not invited to collaborate on the EMW and are reputed to have sneered at it."
In 2013. Umberto Bottazzini andJeremy Gray publishedHidden Harmony in which they examined the history ofcomplex analysis. In the final chapter concerned withtextbooks, they used Klein's and Molk's encyclopedia projects[16] to contrast the approaches in Germany (Weierstrass andRiemann) and France (Cauchy). In 1900 an element of analgebra over a field (usually or) was known as ahypercomplex number, exemplified byquaternions () which contributed thedot product andcross product useful inanalytic geometry, and thedel operator in analysis. Explorative articles on hypercomplex numbers, mentioned by Bottazzini and Gray, written byEduard Study (1898) andElie Cartan (1908), served as advertisements to twentieth century algebraists, and they soon retired the termhypercomplex by displaying the structure of algebras.
Jules Molk was the editor-in-chief of theEncyclopédie des sciences mathématiques pures et appliquées, the French edition of Klein's encyclopedia. It is a French translation and re-writing published between 1904 and 1916 by Gauthier-Villars (partly in cooperation with B. G. Teubner Verlag). According to Jeanne Peiffer, the "French edition is notable because the historical treatment is more extensive, and often more precise (thanks to the collaboration ofTannery andEneström) than the original German version."[17]
^§ 10.10: Complex analysis in the German and FrenchEncyclopädie, pages 691 to 759 inHidden Harmony – Geometric Fantasies, SpringerISBN978-1-4614-5725-1
^Peiffer, Jeanne (2002)."France". In Dauben, Joseph W.; Scriba, Christoph J. (eds.).Writing the history of mathematics: its historical development. Vol. Science Networks. Historical Studies. Vol. 27. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 3–44.ISBN9783764361679. (quote from pp. 28–29)
Hélène Gispert (1999) "Les débuts de l'histoire des mathématiques sur les scènes internationales et le cas de l'entreprise encyclopédique de Felix Klein et Jules Molk",Historia Mathematica 26(4):344–60.
