Mathematics for the World: Publishing Mathematics and the International Book Trade, Macmillan and Co.

Several historians including Andrew Warwick, Joan Richards, and Tony Crilly have offered explanations for why a stale culture of mathematics existed in nineteenth-century England. Nineteenth-century British culture did not generally regard mathematics as capable of failure, growth, or change. This paper argues that a significant contributing influence to this climate was book publishers, and the publisherMacmillan and Company in particular. From 1850 to 1900 Macmillan published hundreds of thousands of mathematical textbooks through industrialized book production. Macmillan distributed these pedagogical materials throughout the UK, Canada, the USA, Australia, India, and elsewhere. Motivated by profits from sales, and abetted by the efforts of their collaborator on mathematical subjects, Isaac Todhunter, Macmillan perpetuated a stale, Cambridge-centric image of mathematics among subsequent generations of mathematical learners in educational contexts around the world. How some of these books may have shaped the pedagogical experience of Canadian mathematician J. C. Fields during his high school and undergraduate education in mathematics is considered.