LibGuides: History of Mathematics: Articles, Journals, Books

Digging Deeper

While General Resources like websites and encyclopedias are useful for learning about your topics and generating ideas, scholarly and academic university-level research and writing requires that you enter the conversation of your professional peers in the fields you are studying. This is done primarily by engaging primary research articles, books written by experts, and utilizing discipline-based scholarly journals. WSU Libraries provides you with access to many academic & professional databases that gather scholarly research for you to investigate, and subscribes to thousands of scholarly journals in both print and electronic format for you to use.

Academic databases can be tricky to navigate and learn to use effectively, but most offer helpful tutorials and tips (much like gaming or apps) and provide the great advantage of professional assembly, design and content. From the library homepage select Electronic Databases link and organize by subject or title. Below are links to databases most useful for publications in mathematics:

HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
A growing partnership of over 70 libraries and research institutions, primarily university libraries, pooling their resources to create a digital library. The primary goals are long-term preservation of fragile collections, along with methods for making these records more readily accessible while still respecting in-copyright works. While WSU faculty, staff, and students can search across the entire digital library, they have full-text access to only the items in the Public Collections.
Terms of Use

ATTENTION: In order to fully access Hathi Trust materials:

click database title to open Hathi Trust
click the Log In button
select Wichita State University
authenticate via DUO Security

Historia Mathematica
Historia Mathematica publishes historical scholarship on mathematics and its development in all cultures and time periods. In particular, the journal encourages informed studies on mathematicians and their work in historical context, on the histories of institutions and organizations supportive of the mathematical endeavor, on historiographical topics in the history of mathematics, and on the interrelations between mathematical ideas, science, and the broader culture.
Math SciNet
Abstracts from journals, conference proceedings and proceedings papers, books or chapters, advanced-level textbooks, and published dissertations in mathematics and related fields. Coverage: 1940-present.
WoframIAlpha
A computational knowledge engine, which aims to answer factual questions instead of simply providing links to relevant web sites. It offers everything from definitions, biographies, and statistics to mathematical formulas, chemical properties, and stock quotes.

Scopus This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Terms of Use

Google Scholar
Provides access to scholarly sources across many disciplines including articles, theses, books, etc. from a variety of publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Links to full-text when available.
Academic Search Complete
A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 12,500 journals and a total of more than 13,200 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. Searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,400 journals.
Applied Science & Technology Abstracts
Contains indexing and abstracts for nearly 800 core English-language, scientific and technical publications back to 1983. Content includes coverage of a wide variety of applied science specialties—acoustics to aeronautics, neural networks to nuclear and civil engineering, computers and informatics and much more.
Science Direct
Abstracts of scholarly literature in science, technology, and medicine with full text available for articles published after 1995. Core subjects include physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, environmental science, health and medicine.

Stack of scholarly journals

Scholarly Journals remain the primary publishing outlet for academic and professional research and writing. WSU Libraries subscribes to thousands of these for your free and full-text usage! As you find references in your general readings and database searches that are stimulating or useful to you - browse the source journals by subject or title - often this will lead to related content, responses, reviews and further research pertaining to your interest and topic.

You have access to professional journals by title through the Online Catalog link (both electronic and physical) as well as electronically by subject or title through the Electronic Journals link.

E-journals on mathematics (over 750!) are available here: WSU Libraries Full Text Electronic Journals: Mathematics

Historia Mathematica
Historia Mathematica publishes historical scholarship on mathematics and its development in all cultures and time periods. In particular, the journal encourages informed studies on mathematicians and their work in historical context, on the histories of institutions and organizations supportive of the mathematical endeavor, on historiographical topics in the history of mathematics, and on the interrelations between mathematical ideas, science, and the broader culture.

Search WSU Libraries Online Catalog to find books and resources related to the evolution of mathematics. Math titles are found on the second floor of Ablah Library under the following call numbers:

QA1-939 Mathematics

QA1-43 General

QA47-59 Tables

QA71-90 Instruments and machines

QA75-76.95 Calculating machines

QA75.5-76.95 Electronic computers. Computer science

QA76.75-76.765 Computer software

QA101-(145) Elementary mathematics. Arithmetic

QA150-272.5 Algebra

QA273-280 Probabilities. Mathematical statistics

QA299.6-433 Analysis

QA440-699 Geometry. Trigonometry. Topology

QA801-939 Analytic mechanics

Finding a Book in the Library's Online Catalog
This tutorial will help you navigate and find books in Wichita State University Libraries' online catalog. (Guide on the Side)

Finding Articles Using SmartSearch
This tutorial will show you how to search for articles using SmartSearch, a library search engine that provides results from a variety of different databases subscribed to by the University Libraries. (Guide on the Side)

History of Mathematics

Research is a Conversation

Database Tutorials

Digging Deeper