Personal Reflections on Dirk Jan Struik

Rowe talks about Dirk Jan Struik, a distinguished mathematician and influential teacher who died on Oct 21, 2000 at the age of 106. Struik's early work on vector and tensor analysis, undertaken with Jan Arnoldus Schouten, helped impart new mathematical techniques needed to master Einstein's general theory of relativity. In his fifties, he focused his attention on the history of mathematics and science. As an historian, Struik saw culture, science, and society as tightly intertwined. Mathematics, his first love, was deeply embedded in the cauldron of cultures, not as something freely imported from without, but rather built from within as a product of human intellectual and social activity. Taking this approach, he tried to ferret out the links between scientific "high culture" and the work of artisans, technicians, and the myriad other practitioners who represent the "applied science sector" within a society's workforce. Struik was a leading Marxist scholar and social activist, hut his Marxism did not dictate his historical analyses, the best of which were guided by an intuitive grasp of the salient features that led to the formation of distinctive scientific cultures.