Joan L. Richards

Joan Livingston Richards (born 1948)^[1] is an American historian of mathematics and a professor of history at Brown University, where she directs the Program of Science and Technology Studies.^[2]

Richards graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1971. She completed a Ph.D. in the history of science at Harvard University in 1981.^[3] Her dissertation, Non-Euclidean Geometry In Nineteenth-century England: A Study of Changing Perceptions of Mathematical Truth, was supervised by I. Bernard Cohen.^[4]

After postdoctoral research at Cornell University, she joined the Brown University faculty in 1982, and was promoted to full professor in 2001.^[3]

Richards is the author of the monograph Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England (Academic Press, 1988)^[5] and of a memoir on her struggle to balance her academic work with caring for a son with a brain tumor, Angles of Reflection: Logic and a Mother's Love (W. H. Freeman, 2000).^[6]

She is the co-editor of The Invention of Physical Science: Intersections of Mathematics, Theology and Natural Philosophy since the Seventeenth Century, Essays in Honor of Erwin N. Hiebert (with Mary Jo Nye and Roger H. Stuewer, Kluwer, 1992).^[7]