Smith-Plimpton East Asian Collection, circa 700-1937

David Eugene Smith (January 21, 1860 – July 29, 1944): Mathematician. Professor of mathematics at the State Normal School, Cortland, N.Y., 1884-1891; at Michigan State Normal College, 1891-1898; at New York State Normal School, Brockport, N.Y., 1898-1901; and at Teachers College, Columbia University, 1901-1944. He was the editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, the American Mathematical Monthly, and Scripta Mathematica, a member of the International Commission on the Teaching of Mathematics, 1908-1944; and librarian of Teachers College, 1902-1920. He was the author of Rara Mathematica (1907), The History of Mathematics (1924), and many other works on the history of mathematics as well as over forty mathematical textbooks and numerous journal articles. He also collected manuscript materials relating to the history of mathematics.

David Eugene Smith was born in January 1860 at Cortland, New York. He received his early education in Cortland and then went on to Syracuse University. From 1881-1884 he practiced law at Cortland before taking up the teaching of mathematics at the State Normal School in Cortland, 1885-1891. For seven years, thereafter, he was professor of mathematics at the Michigan State Normal College, Ypsilanti. After that he served three years as principal of the New York State Normal School at Brockport. In 1901 he was appointed professor of mathematics at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he taught until his retirement in 1926.

Not long after coming to Columbia, he started his annual trips abroad to collect items for his library. Over the years, he crossed the Atlantic seventy-four times and visited almost every country in the world. Besides printed and manuscript books, he collected documents, autograph letters, portraits of mathematicians, medals, counters, and a variety of mathematical and astronomical instruments.

His first trip to Japan was in 1907 and his intentions are made clear in one of his dictated notes as recorded in a memorial publication by Lao G. Simons: "In Japan, I simply laid down the rule that I wanted to buy every mathematical manuscript or printed book that could be found." With the collaboration of Mikami Yoshio, a distinguished scholar of Japanese and Chinese mathematics, he wrote A History of Japanese Mathematics, which was published in 1914.

In 1931 he gave Columbia University his library, which in a 1940 inventory numbered some 20,300 items. After fifty-five years of dormant presence, the Japanese language materials have finally bean cataloged, thus making them accessible to scholars and students. The major portion of the Japanese materials is on Japanese mathematics with a number of titles in the related fields of the abacus, surveying, astronomy, and calendar-making. Works touching on a few other subjects make up the balance.

David Eugene Smith died at his home in New York on July 29, 1944 at the age of 84.

George Arthur Plimpton (July 13, 1855-July 1, 1936): publisher and collector, college trustee and philanthropist. Phillips Exeter Academy, 1873; Amherst College, 1876. After a year at Harvard Law School, he began as salesman in the educational publishing house of Ginn and Heath, becoming a member of the firm in 1882. In 1914, he became head of the firm, renamed Ginn and Company, was active in it until 1931, and remained a member until his death on July 1, 1936.