✍ Scribed by Evgeny A. Zaitsev
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The prominent Russian historian of mathematics, Fedor Andreevich Medvedev, died on February 5, 1993. For more than three decades, he made important and extensive contributions to the history of function and set theory, functional analysis, and the foundations of mathematics. His last years revealed his ability to tackle philosophical problems in mathematics including the background of nonstandard analysis and the infinite in mathematics. Unfortunately, due to financial problems within the Russian Academy of Science, some of his last works were not published.
Medvedev was born on February 18, 1923, in the region of Kozelsk, an old Russian town known for its heroic resistance to Mongol invasion in the 13th century. In 1952, after graduating from the Pedagogical School of Kaluga, he began his career as a teacher of mathematics in a little rural school. When, in the summer of 1955, a doctoral program in the history of science and technology was announced at the Moscow Institute for the History of Science, he became one of its first graduate students. In 1963, after eight years of hard work, during which he studied not only mathematics and its history, but a number of foreign languages and philosophy, he completed his dissertation on the history of function and set theory in Russia, a subject motivated by his adviser, A. P. Yushkevich . Two years later, in 1965, Medvedev's first masterpiece, The Development of Set Theory in the 19th Century [11], was published. This was neither a mere phenomenological description of a step-by-step development nor an adroit scissors-and-paste compilation. Rather, in this book, Medvedev demonstrated his own powerful and original method of exposition and analysis: he took a very limited range of problems of key importance and then treated them with such a degree of precision and accuracy that they required neither addition nor revision. In his first work, in particular, he broke down a traditional view of the history of set theory, as emerging solely out of G. Cantor's concerns with trigonometrical series, and argued for the existence of a second source, namely, R. Dedekind's works on algebra and the foundations of mathematics.
In 1974, Medvedev published his second monograph, entitled The Development of the Notion of the Integral [22]. There he dealt with the origins of integral methods from antiquity up to the modern treatment of the subject in functional analysis. The integral in its relation to measurement and measure, and not necessarily to differentiation, formed the central idea of this book.
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