Gordon McCrea Fisher
Professor (Emeritus), Mathematics and Computer Science
James Madison University,
1968-present
Once Senior Lecturer in mathematics, and history and philosophy of science
University of Otago, later University
of Waikato, New Zealand, 1963-1968
Instructor in mathematics, Princeton University, 1959-1962
also Junior Fellow in the
Humanities, 1961-2
Ph.D. Mathematics, Louisiana State University, 1959
earlier a graduate student &
teaching assistant at
Tulane University, and at the
University of Michigan
B.A. University of Miami, 1951, mathematics and philosophy
M.S. in computer science (all but thesis)
University of Virginia, 1983-1986
U.S. Navy Hospital Corps, 1943-1945
U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1947-1949
Some publications:
"On the group of all homeomorphisms of a manifold", Transactions of the American Mathematical
Society, v 97, 1960, p 193-212. The main result was presented in 1985 in a book called
Knots by Gerhard Burde and Heiner Zieschang under the name "Fisher's theorem".
"Cauchy and the Infinitely Small", Historia Mathematica, v 5, 1978, p 313-331.
"Cauchy's Variables and Orders of the Infinitely Small", British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science, v 30, 1979, pp. 261-265.
"The Infinite and Infinitesimal Quantities of du Bois-Reymond and their Reception:,
Archive for History of Exact Sciences, v 24, 1981, p 101-164.
"Veronese's non-archimedean linear continuum", p 107-145 in a book edited by Paul Ehrlich called
Real Numbers, Generalizations of the Reals, and Theories of
Continua, 1997.
The Truth
about the Protocols: A Literary Forgery http://www.h-net.org/~antis/doc/
Also published in various places:
an article on the structure of Euclid's Elements,
an article about Joseph Priestley,
a critique of E. Wilson's sociobiology,
a study of Sir Arthur Keith's role in the Piltdown fraud.
Sometime reviewer, many for the Mathematical Reviews.