1.1    Purpose and standards

The purpose of this list is to provide a virtual forum for scholarly discussion of the HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS (in a broad sense), amongst professionals, and non-professionals with a serious interest in the field. All scholarly aspects of the history may be discussed, and in addition such issues as:

• History/Philosophy of History of Mathematics
  
• Current trends in the History of Mathematics
  
• Ethnomathematics
  
• History of mathematics in teaching mathematics
  
• Origin of mathematical terms/symbols
  
• Biographies and obituaries
  
• Bibliographical references (databases)
  
• Advertisements of new books, articles, videos, ... [*]
  
• Reviews of these items
  
• Announcements of conferences, meetings, jobs, ...
  

[*] A courtesy copy of these books, articles or videos to the host of this forum would be most welcome.


Pertinent queries, replies, comments ... should be written with the same standards of thoughtfulness and care that apply to other scholarly activities.

At any event, list members should strive to submit posts in a supreme and conscious effort to keep the signal-to-noise ratio so high as possible.


1.2    Languages

Messages should preferably be sent in English as a courtesy to the non-Spanish speaking members of the list, although the list is officially bilingual (Spanish and English).

Postings in other languages (e.g. French, German, Italian, Portuguese ...) are also welcome. But, in this case, whenever a long posting is sent out, an abstract in English would be highly appreciated. Although we do not think we should encourage too many languages on this forum (since many list members might just be monoglots), the list is to be open to those contributors who wish to communicate in their mother tongue, and do not feel confident enough in other languages.

If you are not familiar with the language of a post, but you suspect that the topic discussed is relevant, for instance, to your own field of study (some key-words in the email may suggest that), a solution somehow will be found - at least, we hope so. If you are not sufficiently interested in that thread, you may simply hit the 'delete' key.


1.3    Netiquette

Ego trips will mean trips outside the list. Whereas freedom of speech is wonderful, and discussion of controversial issues on the history of mathematics is to be expected (and welcome!), personal invective cannot take place on this forum.

From the beginning, it must be stated very emphatically that either misuse or abuse of the list, in a way or another, will cause cancellation of the subscription by the Director of [HM].

The list cannot be used to send either commercial or junk-mail of any kind - this includes unsolicited commercial advertisements, viruses warnings, chain letters.

If someone submits a posting that seems to be rather off-topic or of dubious relevance to the list, PLEASE do not send complaints to the whole list. Contact the list owner instead.

2.1    Subscribing - Membership Application

The Director of [HM] must approve each subscription. Those interested in joining our professional discussion list are encouraged to fill out the membership form. Click the link below:

http://chasque.apc.org/jgc/listmembers

If you do not have Internet access, or still you do not feel comfortably enough with the web resources, you may receive the membership form by electronic mail. If so, or you ever need to get in contact with the listowner, please send an email to

owner-historia-matematica@chasque.apc.org

Please, note the following code for membership classes.

Class 1: Web Readers (registration unnecessary). They can read ongoing discussions here. Most of [HM] added services are not available within class 1.

Class 2: Regular Members (registered). They receive individual postings, and they are also allowed to submit messages to the forum.

Class 3: Digest Members (registered). This discussion forum is also available in digest version. Therefore, instead of receiving each email as an individual posting, [HM] Digest Members will receive a group of messages clumped together as a digest, usually one per day. They are entitled to send messages to the forum.

Class 4: Regular & Digest Members (registered); classes 2 & 3 together.

Class 5: Guest Members (registered). These subscribers are allowed to send postings to [HM], but they will not receive messages from the list. They can follow ongoing discussions here.

2.2    Unsubscribing

2.2.1    Regular version

If you ever want to remove yourself from the regular list you can send an email to

majordomo@chasque.apc.org
with the following command in the body of your message:

unsubscribe historia-matematica
2.2.2    Digesto version

If you ever want to remove yourself from the digest format of this list you can send an email to
majordomo@chasque.apc.org

with the following command in the body of your message:

unsubscribe historia-matematica-digest

If you ever need to get in contact with the list owner (if you have trouble unsubscribing, perhaps have a query about the list itself, ...), send an email to

owner-historia-matematica@chasque.apc.org

2.3    Suspend mail

If you do not wish to receive [HM] emails for a certain period (e.g. you will be out of town or have no access to e-mail), please submit this form to temporarily halt email messages from [HM]. You may look at the list archives to read any messages you may have missed while away.


2.4    Your email address

For several reasons, Majordomo is set up to reject commercial webmail addresses (e.g. hotmail.com, excite.com, yahoo.com, etc.). If you are interested in subscribing to [HM] you should provide a non-web [and non-commercial] email address.

If your email address changes, please make sure that our records are updated. Otherwise, you will not be able to use the commands of Majordomo such as "unsubscribe", and you may have problems to get your messages through the list.

If your server bounces messages for more than three days you will be unsubscribed. When the problem is fixed, you may subscribe again.

3.1    Address of [HM]

To submit a post to the HISTORIA MATEMATICA mailing list send an email to

historia-matematica@chasque.apc.org
PLEASE check the message headers before sending your message so that you actually know where your posting is going.

Our [HM] list is set up to send replies to everyone on the list.


3.2    Cross-posting

Cross-posting (that is to say, sending a message to more than one mailing list or newsgroup at the same time) is discouraged.

If after reflection you decide to send a posting to more than one forum, PLEASE submit your messages as entirely separate emails.

A strong reason for rejecting cross-posting is that our mailing list is configured so that only [HM] members can post (with the only exception of occasional guests).

If cross-posting were accepted onto [HM], then members subscribed to other forums might reply to our list as well, which might cause fragmentation of the thread. Postings to many mailing lists often lead to discussions where members of each list see only a part of the ongoing exchanges, and this, more often than not, leads to confusion or misunderstandings.

I strongly encourage you to choose the appropriate list.


3.3    Subject line

The subject line should be meaningful and informative so that people can get a rough (but a good) idea about the subject of your message.

When you start a new thread, for instance,

First incommensurables

Majordomo attaches the prefix [HM] to your subject line, so that your posting will be sent out and archived as

[HM] First incommensurables

If anyone wants to post a follow-up on this thread, s/he is strongly encouraged to write any of the following subject lines:

Re: [HM] First incommensurables

[HM] First incommensurables

First incommensurables

Nevertheless, the subject line

Re: First incommensurables

is not appropriate, since generates another thread; namely

[HM] Re: First incommensurables

This has the effect that your response (with a new subject line) is not linked in the archives (at Swarthmore Forum) with the original posting, and so it is harder to locate or thread the reactions to the original message.

Besides, do not write "RE:" (or other prefixes) instead of "Re:". Please, use the previous subject line with the same capitalization, etc. as was used before. This convention makes it helpful for the archiving software (at Swarthmore Forum) to sort postings by subject.

I strongly encourage list members NOT to change the 'subject line' unless there is good reason. Now, if over the course of a discussion, the subject evolves considerably it would be wise to change the 'subject line' accordingly.


3.4    Body of message

PLEASE, edit your messages properly, and do not quote irrelevant segments of a previous posting when replying. Mind that it is unnecessary (and inconvenient) to cite the entire message, as everyone on the discussion group will have received a copy of the original post. This reasonable practice saves downloading time, reading time, disc space, and also helps with a better presentation of the digest.

Some email programs send out email in formats which cannot be read by others. PLEASE, configure your mailer so that your messages are delivered in plain text (and NOT in enriched text such as 'html' output). Besides, refrain from putting non-standard symbols (such as special ALT characters) into your contributions.

The use of accents is strongly discouraged. If you think that a specific reference requires accents, then a code would be advisable. For instance:

/	acute accent	[ matema/tica := matemática ]
\	grave accent	[ alge\bre := algèbre ]
,	cedilla	[ lec,on := leçon ]
~	tilde	[ an~o := año ]
"	umlaut	[ Ko"rper := Körper ]
^	circumflex	[ polyno^me := polynôme ]

Never submit attachments to the list, which are a particular problem to many subscribers, not only because of the format, but also because of the size of these files.

Before sending email, contributors should always ask themselves the following crucial question:

"Is my posting relevant to the purpose of this forum?"

If you are not quite sure whether your post is appropriate to this forum, please drop the list owner a private email.


3.5    Post from the web

Whether you are a list member or a guest you may also send us your contribution from the web. Click here.

Two websites kindly host archives of all contributions:

4.1    Math Forum

http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/historia_matematica/

4.2    Mathematics Archives

Please, mind that the archiving service at

http://archives.math.utk.edu/hypermail/historia/

is offline and is no longer operational. It was taken offline as of October 13, 2000.

If you are member of this list, you can review who are subscribed. Please ask your login and password, and click here.

Julio González Cabillón
Director of [HM]