Eisele taught mathematics at Hunter College for nearly 50 years.[3][4] She began teaching as an instructor there after her college graduation in 1923,[1][2][3] eventually reached the rank of full professor in 1965,[1][2] and retired in 1972.[3][2]
Eisele died on January 15, 2000[5] in Manhattan, New York City.[3]
Peirce studies
As a student at Columbia University, Eisele took a course in the history of mathematics from David Eugene Smith, but her professional contributions to the subject began in 1947, when she took a sabbatical to prepare for a course in the history of mathematics that she had been asked to teach at Hunter College.[3] While working in the George Arthur Plimpton collection at the Columbia University library, she found a manuscript by Charles Sanders Peirce on Fibonacci's Liber Abaci and in 1951 she published a paper about her discovery in Scripta Mathematica.[2][3] Other early works of Eisele on Peirce included his correspondence with Simon Newcomb and his Peirce quincuncial projection for maps of the world.[3] Her work on Peirce took a holistic view, in which his contributions to philosophy and logic were treated as part of a whole together with his contributions to mathematics and science, rather than as separate and unrelated chapters in his life.[1]
Eisele served as the president of the Charles S. Peirce Society from 1973 to 1975.[3][4]
In 1976, Eisele began publishing a multi-volume collection of Peirce's writings that she had edited, the New Elements of Mathematics, and in the same year she helped organize the Peirce Bicentennial International Congress in Amsterdam.[1][2][3]
Books
Studies in the Science and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce: Essays by Carolyn Eisele (1979)[3][4]
Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science: A History of Science (1985)[2][4]
In 1980, Eisele became an honorary member of the crew of the United States Coast Guard ship USC&GSS Peirce.[3] In 1981, a symposium on Peirce studies was held in her honor at Hunter College, the proceedings of which were published as a festschrift in Historia Mathematica.[1][3] In 1985, Eisele was given the Behavioral Sciences, History and Philosophy of Sciences award from the New York Academy of Sciences.[7] Her other honors include a Doctor of Humanities degree awarded by Texas Tech University in 1980 and a Doctor of Science degree awarded in 1982 by Lehigh University.[8]
^ abcdefCarolyn Eisele Collection, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, archived from the original on March 4, 2016, retrieved August 3, 2014.
^Kaufman, Authur; Dauben, Joseph; Gleason, Mary Louise (2001). "Carolyn Eisele, 1902-2000". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 74 (5): 228–229. ISSN0065-972X. JSTOR3218596.
