About half a century after Thales came Pythagoras. Under his inspiration geometry was first pursued as a study for its own sake. A man of great abili… - Raymond Clare Archibald

In yesteryears there were two gloriously inspiring centers of mathematical study in America. One of these was at the University of Chicago, when , and and were in their prime. The other center was at The Johns Hopkins University, 1876–83, where scholars were " Led by soaring-genius'd Sylvester," as has expressed it in his " Ode to The Johns Hopkins University."

The idea of constructing a table in which the logarithm of unity was zero originated with Napier. Napier and Briggs never thought of logarithms as exponents of a base. ... It was not till considerably later that our modern definition of a logarithm as an exponent was put forward by such mathematicians as , 1684; , 1742; , 1748, 1770.

Our knowledge of Babylonian mathematics is derived mainly from tablets in the British Museum, the Prussian State Museum of Berlin, the Ottoman Museum of Constantinople, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Pennsylvania and the Palais du Cinquantenaire of Brussels.