Dr. L.M. (Lukas) Verburgt

Researcher
History and Philosophy of Science
l.m.verburgt@uu.nl

PAPERS

2020

'The history of knowledge and the future history of ignorance'. KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge (forthcoming May 2020). 

'Pragmatism at Cambridge, England before 1900'. British Journal for the History of Philosophy (accepted with revision). 

‘Khinchin’s 1929 paper on von Mises’s frequency theory of probability’. Statistical Science (accepted with revision). 

'The first random walk: a note on John Venn's graph'. The Mathematical Intelligencer (forthcoming). 

'The Venn-MacColl dispute in Nature'. History and Philosophy of Logic (forthcoming). 

‘John Venn on the foundations of symbolic logic’. History and Philosophy of Logic (accepted with revision).

2018

Verburgt, L.M. 'Duncan F. Gregory and Robert Leslie Ellis: second-generation reformers of British mathematics'. Intellectual History Review, 28 (3), 369-397.

2016

Verburgt, L.M., Hoppe-Kondrikova, O. 'On A. Ya. Khinchin’s‘Ideas of intuitionism and the struggle for a subject matter in contemporary mathematics’ (1926): a translation with introduction and commentary (1926)'. Historia Mathematica, 43 (4), 369-398.

Verburgt, L.M. 'The place of probability in Hilbert’s axiomatization of physics, ca. 1900-1928'. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 53, 28-44.

Verburgt, L.M. 'Robert Leslie Ellis, William Whewell and Kant: the role of Rev H.F.C. Logan'. Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 31 (1), 47-51.

Verburgt, L.M. 'Duncan F. Gregory, William Walton and the development of British algebra: “algebraical geometry”, “geometrical algebra”, abstraction'. Annals of Science, 73 (1), 40-67. [*appears on the list of ‘Notable Writings’ in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2017, Princeton University Press]

2015 

Verburgt, L.M. 'The objective and the subjective in mid-nineteenth-century British probability theory'. Historia Mathematica, 42 (4), 468-487.

2014 

Verburgt, L.M. 'Remarks on the idealist and empiricist interpretation of frequentism: Robert Leslie Ellis versus John Venn'. Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 29 (3), 184-195.

Verburgt, L.M. 'John Venn’s hypothetical infinite frequentism and logic'. History and Philosophy of Logic, 35 (3), 248-271 [*appears on the list of ‘Notable Writings’ in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2015, Princeton University Press].

2013 
Verburgt, L.M. 'Robert Leslie Ellis’s work on philosophy of science and the foundations of probability theory'. Historia Mathematica, 40 (4), 423-454.

BOOKS

John Venn: A Life in Logic (monograph, forthcoming 2021) The University of Chicago Press

Victorian Probability: The Nature and Limits of Scientific Knowledge in England, 1830-1870 (monograph, contracted), Palgrave Macmillan

"A Prodigy of Universal Genius": Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859 (edited volume, contracted), Springer Nature

Selected Correspondence and Unpublished Writings of John Venn (edited volume, contracted), Springer Nature

Syllogism's Ghost: Aristotle and the Emergence of Classical Logic (edited volume, contracted, w/ Matteo Cosci), Bloomsbury Academic

‘A Terrible Piece of Bad Metaphysics’? Towards a History of Abstraction in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Probability Theory, Mathematics and Logic (2015). PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 654 pp.

CHAPTERS

(Forthcoming) ‘Bacon scholarship: editing and interpreting’. In L.M. Verburgt (ed.), “A Prodigy of Universal Genius”: Robert Leslie Ellis, 1817-1859.

(Forthcoming) ‘John Venn: Life, work and legacy’. In L.M. Verburgt (ed.), Selected Correspondence and Unpublished Letters of John Venn.

REVIEWS

2020

Review of Robin Wilson and Amirouche Moktefi (eds.), The Mathematical Worlds of Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Mathematical Reviews.

Review of William Boos, Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition. Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society (forthcoming September)

2017

Review of Jan von Plato’s ‘The Great Formal Machinery Works: Theories of Deduction and Computation at the Origins of the Digital Age’. Isis, forthcoming.

2014

Verburgt, L.M. 'Flows, fluxes, and monads: the conceptual madness of experimental social ontology', Parallax, 20 (1), 114-117.

Invited lectures

(2020) ‘The nature and limits of science at the dawn of the Victorian era’, Descartes Centre Colloquium, Utrecht University, 21 April.

(2020) ‘Unknowability: a historiographical inquiry’, Philosophical Tradition in Context Seminar, Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, (t.b.a.).

(2018) ‘”A Bolshevik menace”: L.E.J. Brouwer’s reception from Cambridge to Moscow in the 1920s’, Mathematical Communities in the Reconstruction after the Great War (1918-1928), Centre International de Recontres Mathematique, Marseille, 15 November.

(2018) ‘Objective and subjective probability’, Rutgers University Business School, New Brunswick, 15 October. 

(2018) ‘Robert Leslie Ellis, James Spedding and The Works of Francis Bacon: editing and interpreting’, The Life and Work of Robert Leslie Ellis, Trinity College, Cambridge, 28 September.

(2017) ‘Between modernism and counter-modernism in mathematics, 1920-1930’, Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences, University of Amsterdam, 13 March.

Conferences

(2020) 'On the heels of ignorance: measuring uncertainty and dealing with errors in early psychometrics', BSHM-CSHPM Conference, University of St. Andrews, 6 July. 

(2019) ‘Beyond knowledge’, New Paradigms in the History of Knowledge, Ca’Foscari University of Venice, 5 December.

(2019) ‘What the history of knowledge should also be: the case of negative knowledge’, 8th Biannual Meeting of the Belgian-Dutch Society for the History of Science and Universities, Zeist, 21 June.

(2019) ‘Experimental abstraction: Francis Galton, John Venn, and Cambridge anthropometry, 1887-1891’, History of Science Society Annual Meeting, 26 July.

(2017) ‘John Venn: Cambridge moral scientist’, Making of the Humanities Conference VI, Oxford, September 29

(2017) ‘Modern probability theory in Soviet Russia: the case of A. Ya. Khinchin’, Congrès de la Société Francaise d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Strasbourg, 19 April.

(2016) Victorian statistics: from the London Statistical Society to the Royal Statistical Society’, 7th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Prague, September 23.

Translations

Graham, L., Kantor, J-M. 2016 [2009]. In de Naam van Oneindigheid: Een Waargebeurd Verhaal over Religieus Mysticisme en Wiskundige Creativiteit. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University, 290 pp. (Originally appeared at Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).