When Ivor Grattan-Guinness, who has died aged 73 of heart failure, became interested in the history of mathematics in the 1960s, it was an area of study widely considered to be irrelevant to mathematics proper, or something that older mathematicians did on retirement. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he found that mathematics was presented drily, with no inkling of the original motivations behind its development. So Ivor set himself the task of asking “What happened in the past?” – as opposed, he said, to taking the heritage viewpoint of asking “How did we get here?”
One of his earliest subjects was the 19th-century French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, who developed Fourier analysis, a powerful tool for the exploration of wave motion. Fourier was a revolutionary activist, went to Egypt as a scientific adviser to Napoleon, and was involved in various complications with the emperor after his return to France. Joseph Fourier, 1768-1830: A Survey of His Life and Work (written with Jerome R Ravetz, 1972) was followed by a large three-volume work, Convolutions in French Mathematics 1800-1840 (1990).
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