Glen Van Brummelen


Glen Robert Van Brummelen is a Canadian historian of mathematics specializing in historical applications of mathematics to astronomy. In his words, he is the “best trigonometry historian, and the worst trigonometry historian”.
He is president of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics, and was a co-editor of Mathematics and the Historian's Craft: The Kenneth O. May Lectures.

Life

Van Brummelen earned his PhD degree from Simon Fraser University in 1993, and served as a professor of mathematics at Bennington College from 1999 to 2006. He then transferred to Quest University Canada as a founding faculty member. In 2020, he became the dean of the Faculty of Natural and Applied Sciences at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC.
Glen Van Brummelen has published the first major history in English of the origins and early development of trigonometry, The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry. His second book, Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry, concerns spherical trigonometry.
He teaches courses on the history of mathematics and trigonometry at MathPath, specifically Heavenly Mathematics and Spherical Trigonometry. He is also well known for the glensheep, a two-dimensional animal he coined at MathPath.

Works