Library Person
Jacob Klein
Russian-American philosopher; phenomenology, the history of mathematics, and the concept-formation behind Greek and modern algebra.
Jacob Klein (1899–1978) was born in the Russian Empire, took a doctorate at Marburg in 1922, and studied phenomenology under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger before emigrating from Nazi Germany. From 1938 until his death he taught at St. John’s College in Annapolis, serving as dean from 1949 to 1958, and became a close intellectual associate of fellow émigré Leo Strauss. His major work, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968, translated from his 1934–36 German essays), traces how the modern concept of number as symbolic abstraction diverged from the Greek concept of number as a determinate collection of things.
Works in the Library
Jacob Klein BOOK 1968
Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra
Jacob Klein on the conceptual origins of algebra in and after Greek mathematics.
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