616 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Among the mathematicians who have died in 1916, a place 

 must be given to Ernst Mach, late Professor at the University 

 of Vienna, who died on February 22, 191 6, at the age of 

 seventy-eight years. The most profound influence which 

 Mach exerted on his contemporaries was through his historical 

 and critical studies of various branches of physics. His 

 best-known work is his famous Mechanics, which well shows 

 his mathematical skill and the great enlightenment that his 

 singularly unprejudiced view of science brought about. On 

 July 10 Emory McClintock, who is fairly well known from 

 his contributions to the American Journal of Mathematics, 

 died at the age of seventy-six years. A notice of the sudden 

 death of C. S. Jackson is given in Nature (1916, 98, 173) I 

 Pierre Duhem of Bordeaux died in September 191 6, at the age 

 of sixty-seven ; and S. B. MacLaren died of wounds on 

 August 14, 1916. 



At the Congress of Mathematicians which met at Cam- 

 bridge in 191 2, it was decided to hold the next (the sixth) 

 Congress at Stockholm in 191 6. Of course it was impossible 

 to hold this Congress on account of the war, and so a meeting 

 of mathematicians from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and 

 Norway was held at Stockholm from August 30 to September 2, 

 1916. 



Dr. Caroline E. Seely {Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 1916, 23, 

 31-4) gives a translation of part of the Mittag-Leffler testa- 

 ment relating to the proposed Scandinavian Institute of pure 

 mathematics which was referred to in Science Progress 

 (1916, 11, 266). 



History. — The first volume of the collected works of Paolo 

 Ruffini has been published under the auspices of the Circolo 

 Matematico of Palermo (Opere matematiche, Palermo, 1915), 

 with notes by Prof. Ettore Bortolotti. Historically, Ruffini 

 occupies an important place in the development of the theory 

 of groups between Lagrange and Abel, as was pointed out by 

 Burkhardt ; and his most important work, the Teoria generate 

 delle equazioni, in cui si dimostra impossibile la soluzione 

 algebraica delle equazioni generali di grado superiore al quarto, 

 is included in the present volume. 



Felix Klein (Math. Ann. 1916, 77, 303-6) gives an 

 eleventh report on the position of the publication of Gauss's 

 Werke. An eleventh volume is planned, which is to contain 



