Glen Van Brummelen
Glen is a historian of mathematics and astronomy in ancient and medieval cultures, sometimes described as the only historian of trigonometry in the world.
He is author of The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry (Princeton, 2009), Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry (Princeton, 2013), and Trigonometry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2020). He has served twice as president of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics.
Prior to TWU, he was a founding faculty member and mathematics division coordinator of Quest University Canada. He won the Mathematical Association of America’s Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2016, and the 3M National Teaching Fellowship in 2017.
Research Interests
Glen studies the interactions between mathematics and science in premodern cultures. He is especially interested in trigonometric methods in ancient Greek, medieval Islamic, and medieval European astronomy. Recently he has been working as a member of the European Research Council-funded team ALFA (Alfonsine Astronomy), exploring the development of spherical astronomy in medieval and early Renaissance Europe and its links to Greek and Islamic predecessors.
His research has recently uncovered the beginning of the modern tangent and arc sine functions, and he is currently exploring the origin of our modern decimal positional numeration in the astronomical tables of the 15th century.
Education
Ph.D. (Simon Fraser University), 1993
M.Sc. (Simon Fraser University, 1988)
B.Sc. (University of Alberta), 1986
Source: Trinity Western University
