Jeffrey A. Oaks

Professor and chair

Mathematics and Computer Science

Office:  Lilly Science Hall 213

Email: oaks@uindy.edu

Phone: 317-788-3454

Ph.D. 1991, University of Rochester

2005 (with Haitham M. Alkhateeb)  "Māl, enunciations, and the prehistory of Arabic algebra".  Historia Mathematica 32, 400-425.

Book reviews

2011  "Roshdi Rashed, ed., Al-Khwārizmī:  The Beginnings of Algebra.  London:  SAQI, 2009."  BSHM Bulletin:  Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics 26, 68-70.

2009  "Medieval Italian practical mathematics.  Jacopo da Firenze's Tractatus Algorizmi and Early Italian Abbacus Culture, by Jens Høyrup.  (Basel:  Birkhauser, 2007)."  Newsletter of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics.  Vol. 45, November 2009, 19-23.  The full 14-page review is on the Society's web page:  http://www.cshpm.org/ (click on"archives").  Høyrup's answer is there, too, and my response to his answer can be found at http://pages.uindy.edu/~oaks/Articles/ResponseHoyrup.pdf.  (Reviews by Menso Folkerts and Warren van Egmond agree with me, and Raffaella Franci has recently written an article explicitly supporting my conclusions.  "The history of algebra in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries.  Some remarks on recent historiography" is available online:  http://publicacions.iec.cat/repository/pdf/00000165%5C00000095.pdf.

2008  "Barnabas Hughes, ed., Fibonacci's De Practica Geometrie (Heidelberg:  Springer, 2008)"  Centaurus 51, 168-169.

Bibliography

2001-present.  I compiled an online Bibliography of Medieval Islamic Mathematics, arranged by topic:  http://facstaff.uindy.edu/~oaks/Biblio/Intro.htm.  Countless articles and books have been included so far.

Differential Geometry

1994  "Singularities and self-intersections of curves evolving on surfaces".  Indiana University Mathematics Journal 43, 959-981.  The main result and its proof can also be found in the 2001 book The Curve Shortening Problem by Kai-Seng Chou and Xi-Ping Zhu (CRC Press).

Railroad tie preservation and date nails

Not surprisingly, I am just about the only one around who studies the history of railroad tie preservation.  For more info click here:
                            http://pages.uindy.edu/~oaks/DateNailInfo.htm

Publications
1999  Date Nails and Railroad Tie Preservation, University of Indianapolis Archeology and Forensics Laboratory.  A 560 page book in three volumes.

In the April 2006 issue of Technology and Culture is Mark Aldrich's article "From Forest Conservation to Market Preservation:  Invention and Diffusion of Wood-Preserving Technology, 1880-1939".  The author makes many minor errors, he misses or misrepresents the major episodes in the history of tie preservation, and his main argument is completely wrong.  I wrote a rebuttal, which at 22 pages turned out to be too long for the journal.  The full version an be read here:
                            http://pages.uindy.edu/~oaks/Articles/Response.htm
My reduced, two-page critique appeared as part of "Communications", Technology and Culture 48.3, July 2007, pp. 680-688.

The Roman Calendar

I collected exact dates of events in Roman history, and I compiled them by day of the year.  You can look up, for example, July 16, and find out what events form Roman history are known to have occurred on that day.  Over 1,500 events are listed:

1995  Ancient Roman Calendar.  Privately published.  For a .pdf file of the whole book, click here:  http://pages.uindy.edu/~oaks/Calendar.pdf.

1996  "The Birth Dates of Valentinian II and Valentinian III:  A Correction to PLRE I", Medieval Prosopography 17.1, 147-148.