9 o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



are given to all the reviews of mathematical books which appear 

 in current literature : occasionally there are valuable remarks 

 in reviews, and so this is a good feature. It is of interest to 

 mention the nationalities of the collaborators of the Revue : 

 twenty-eight are Dutch, three are Polish, five are Russian, one 

 is Italian, two are Hungarian, one is Bohemian, one is German, 

 one is Japanese, one is Rumanian, one is Serbian, and two are 

 American. One of these Americans has ceased to contribute, 

 and the vacant place has now been taken by one Briton. These 

 figures, especially when they are taken in conjunction with 

 those given for the Jahrbuch, are very illuminating. Few things 

 could bring home to us more clearly the small part which many 

 of the nations, and particularly our own, are taking in the very 

 necessary work of the organisation of mathematical research. 

 It must be remembered that many of the men mentioned above 

 are working for both the Jahrbuch and the Revue : thus in 

 Great Britain one man alone is working in this particular field 

 of organisation. This disgraceful state of things is of course 

 common to many branches of science ; and in this connection 

 we may refer to a long letter from Sir Ronald Ross in Nature 

 (1916,86, 536). 



A few words are necessary on the relation of our accounts 

 of recent progress in mathematics to the account which is 

 given by the Revue. In the accounts in this quarterly, some 

 attempt is made at selection and criticism. Of course that 

 necessarily implies that the views of a particular man come 

 into consideration, and, though the accounts published in the 

 Revue have the merit of being as nearly as possible unprejudiced 

 and uncritical, yet for certain purposes it may be valuable to 

 view things from a unitary standpoint. In particular, it will 

 be noticed that in this quarterly attention to geometrical work 

 is confined to those papers which are of interest from the point 

 of view of method ; and particular attention is paid to work 

 on the history and logical side of mathematics, and to analysis. 



On February 11 Richard Dedekind (1831 — 1916) died at 

 Brunswick. He was one of the chief contributors to the theory 

 of algebraic numbers, but his best-known works were his tracts 

 on continuity and irrational numbers (1872) and on the nature 

 and meaning of numbers (1888). These tracts are of funda- 

 mental importance to the principles of mathematics, and the 

 later tract contains an independent elaboration of that part of 





