"The Twenty-first International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) was held in Kyoto, Japan, from August 21 through 29, 1990"--Pref.

Includes bibliographical references.

Mathematics: an historian's perspective / Joseph W. Dauben -- Une methode de restitution - quelques examples dans le cas de pascal / Hara Kokiti -- The birth of Maxwell's electro-magnetic field equations / William J. Ellison -- Complex curves - origins and intrinsic geometry / Jeremy J. Gray -- From GauB to WeierstraB: determinant theory and its historical evaluation / Eberhard Knobloch -- The reciprocity law from Euler to Eisenstein / Gunther Frei -- Three aspects of the theory of complex multiplication / Takase Masahito -- The establishment of the Takagi-Artin class field ktheory / Miyake Katsuya

-- Where did twentieth-century mathematics go wrong? / Chandler Davis -- Indian mathematics in Arabic / Roshdi Rashed -- The Tetsujutsu Sankei (1722), an 18th century treatise on the methods of investigation in mathematics / Annick Horiuchi -- The adoption of Western mathematics in Meiji Japan, 1853-1903 / Sasake Chikara -- The philosophical views of Klein and Hilbert / David E. Rowe -- Hermann Weyl's contribution to geometry in the years 1918 to 1923 / Erhard Scholz -- The origins of infinite dimensional unitary representations of lie groups / Sugiura Mitsuo - -

Dispelling a myth: questions and answers about Bourbaki's early works, 1934-1944 / Lilane Beaulieu -- Questions in the historiography of modern mathematics: documentation and the use of primary sources / Erwin Neuenschwander -- List of invited speakers at the Tokyo history of mathematics symposium 1990 -- List of speakers and titles of their lectures at session B (short communications) .