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The translation into English of Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin's (1894–1959) 1926 paper entitled ‘Ideas of intuitionism and the struggle for a subject matter in contemporary mathematics’ is made available for the first time. Here, Khinchin presented the famous foundational debate between L.E.J. Brouwer and David Hilbert of the 1920s in terms of a search for a mathematics with content. His main aim seems to have been to make intuitionism ideologically acceptable to his audience at the Communist Academy by means of the claim that insofar as Brouwer's intuitionism had a clear ‘subject matter’ and Hilbert's new program was a concession to intuitionism, the alleged victory of intuitionism not only implied the defeat of ‘empty’ formalism, but also showed the compatibility and affinity of Marxism with the newest developments in modern mathematics. This introduction provides a tentative exploration of the issue of what was tactical (or due to ideological pressure) and what was real scientific interest (or due to ignorance) (or what was both) in Khinchin's 1926 paper in the form of a detailed commentary, especially, on the tactical side of his presentation of the positions of Brouwer and Hilbert.

In 1903, Epstein published his proof of meromorphic continuation and a functional equation for Dirichlet series associated with quadratic forms, now called Epstein zeta-functions. However, already in 1889 (or even earlier) Hurwitz was aware of these results as his mathematical diaries and some unpublished notes (in an almost final form) found in his estate at the ETH Zurich show. In this article we present and analyze Hurwitz's notes and compare his reasoning with Epstein's paper in detail.

The date of publication of Helmholtz's first paper on the foundations of geometry is discussed.

As early as the 16th century, Simon Jacob, a German reckoning master, noticed that the worst case in computing the greatest common divisor of two numbers by the Euclidean algorithm occurs if these numbers are equimultiples of two consecutive members of the Fibonacci sequence.

The unpublished scientific papers of Joseph Liouville located in the Institut de France in Paris have been investigated by several scholars in recent years, and it has been pointed out on a number of occasions that the Paris collection is incomplete. The present article analyzes the history of Liouville's unpublished papers and gives an initial survey of additional papers discovered in Bordeaux in 1983–1984. Besides the material originating from Liouville, the Bordeaux collection also contains many manuscripts of Charles-Francois Sturm which had long been searched for and had therefore been assumed by most to have been lost. Furthermore, there are documents connected with the transmission and editing of the unpublished papers of Evariste Galois, which were also once in Liouville's possession.

That Euler was quite aware of the subtleties of assigning a sum to a divergent series is amply demonstrated in his paper De seriebus divergentibus which appeared in Novi commentarii academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae 5 (1754/55), 205–237 (= Opera Omnia (1) 14, 585–617) in the year 1760. The first half of this paper contains a detailed exposition of Euler's views which should be more readily accessible to the mathematical community.The authors present here a translation from Latin of the summary and first twelve sections of Euler's paper with some explanatory comments. The remainder of the paper, treating Wallis' hypergeometric series and other technical matter, is described briefly. Appended is a short bibliography of works concerning Euler which are available to the English-speaking reader.

Brief mention is made of early work in the design of experiments by Galen, Avicenna, and Laplace, after which a seemingly unknown 1815 paper of Gergonne's on polynomial regression is introduced and discussed, and a translation of the paper presented.

This is the first English translation of Bolzano's paper, Rein analytischer Beweis des Lehrsatzes, dass zwischen je zwey Werthen, die ein entgegengesetzes Resultat gewahren, wenigstens eine reelle Wurzel der Gleichung liege (Prague 1817). It has already appeared in French, Russian, and Czechoslovakian translations. The paper represents an important stage in the rigorous foundation of analysis and is one of the earliest occasions when the continuity of a function and the convergence of an infinite series are both defined and used correctly.

A discussion of the applicability of the concepts of T. S. Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, stimulated by the statement by M. J. Crowe of ten “laws” concerning change in the history of mathematics. The concepts “revolution” and “crisis” are rejected, while the concepts centering around the sociology of the scientific community are accepted for systematic use in historiography of mathematics. This is supplemented by the consideration of extra-mathematical influences. Finally the “laws” of Crowe are shown to be explainable with those concepts.