Leo Corry


Leo Corry is an Israeli historian of mathematics.

Biography

Corry migrated with his Jewish family to Venezuela when he was four years old. He attended primary and secondary school at Colegio Moral y Luces of Caracas and then at the Universidad Simón Bolívar studied mathematics with licentiate's degree in 1977. He attended graduate school at the University of Tel Aviv. There he received in 1983 his master's degree in mathematics with master's thesis Splitting data in cohomology classes, supervised by Shmuel Rosset, and in 1990 his Ph.D. in the history of science with Ph.D. thesis The origins of category theory as a mathematical discipline, supervised by Sabetai Unguru and Shmuel Rosset. At the University of Tel Aviv, Corry became in 1985 an instructor, in 1996 a lecturer, in 2004 an associate professor and from 2007 a full professor in the Cohn Institute for the History of Science; he was the director of the Institute from 2003 to 2009. In the academic year 1994–1995, he was the director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT, for the academic year 1995–1996 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and in 2006 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Corry has done research on the development of modern algebra and number theory and the philosophy of mathematics. His research has also dealt with Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, David Hilbert and his school, the history of Latin American science, and Jorge Luis Borges. With John Stachel and Jürgen Renn, Corry discovered new documents concerning the priority dispute between Hilbert and Einstein, and these new documents support Einstein against Hilbert.
In 2006, Corry was an invited speaker at the ICM in Madrid with a talk On the origin of Hilbert's sixth problem: physics and the empiricist approach to axiomatization.
From 1999 to 2009 and from 2011 to the present, he has been an editor of Science in Context.

Selected publications