RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE 5 



At a meeting of the Council of the Mathematical Association 

 of America at the end of 1916 " it was voted to appoint a com- 

 mittee which should, in conjunction with a similar committee 

 at the [American Mathematical] Society, consider the question 

 of possible assistance for the Revue Semestrielle and the Jahrbuck 

 iiber die Fortschritte der Mathematik. The committee was em- 

 powered to include also in its investigation other international 

 projects of a kind similar to the two named. Mathematicians 

 the country over are feeling increasingly the deplorable in- 

 fluence of the European war as it affects such indispensable 

 aids as the German and French encyclopaedias, the two journals 

 above mentioned, and similar reference books. This action 

 has been taken in order that the two great mathematical 

 organisations of America may consider what contribution they 

 may perhaps make in rendering assistance to these valuable 

 journals of record " (Amer. Math. Monthly, 191 7, 24, 64). At 

 a meeting of the Chicago Section of the American Mathematical 

 Society held at about the same time, among the topics inform- 

 ally discussed were " the desirability of holding ourselves in 

 readiness to assist the publishers of the Revue Semestrielle and 

 the Fortschritte in case it becomes necessary, on account of the 

 war conditions, in order to continue the publications " (ibid. 97). 



A short account of the life and work of Jean Gaston Darboux 

 (1842-19 1 7) is given by Sir Joseph Larmor in Nature (191 7, 99, 

 28). Darboux's work was principally on the theories of sur- 

 faces and curves, and his great book on infinitesimal geometry, 

 the Theorie generate des surfaces, was published at Paris in four 

 volumes between 1887 and 1896. The second volume of the 

 CEuvres of Henri Poincare, edited by Darboux, was published at 

 Paris in 191 6. 



History. — J. H. Weaver (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 1916, 23, 

 127-35) gives an interesting introductory study of the work 

 of Pappus of Alexandria. It appears to be doubtful that Sir 

 T. L. Heath will ever bring out any book on Pappus, and Weaver 

 has made a careful translation of the Collections. The facts 

 which have come out of Weaver's long study seem to set at 

 naught the accusations of many writers of plagiarisms on the 

 part of Pappus. Weaver also gave (School Sci. and Math. 

 1916,16, 674-9) some theorems from Pappus on isoperimetrical 

 figures. 



A Spanish translation has lately been published (Madrid, 



