Mathematics and Social Utopias in France: Olinde Rodrigues and His Times

Annotation A mathematician, a social reformer within Saint-Simon's utopian-socialist movement, and later a prosperous banker, Olinde Rodrigues is a fascinating figure of the city of Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. His many interests and associations make him a remarkable character in the history of nineteenth-century mathematics. Since archival resources on Rodrigues are not abundant and since they are scattered throughout a variety of archives--from large to very small--studying him presents difficult historiographic challenges. These are met for the first time in this book, written by a team of mathematicians, historians of mathematics, and historians of culture and society for people interested in any of these fields. An effort has been made to give continuity to these different contributions and to focus them around different aspects of Rodrigues's absorbing life and interesting mathematical work. The starting chapters attempt to recreate the scientific and social background in which he moved in Paris. His contributions to a variety of mathematical fields (orthogonal polynomials, combinatorics, and rotations) are discussed in the chapters that follow. The book ends with a discussion on contemporary responses to his work in mathematics. Sufficient background is given in the discussion of Rodrigues's work in mathematics to make it accessible to a reader familiar with basic college mathematics.