Oxford mathematics at a low ebb? An 1855 dispute over examination results.

Between December 1855 and March 1856, a public dispute raged, in British national newspapers and locally published pamphlets, between two teachers at the University of Oxford: the mathematical lecturer Francis Ashpitel and Bartholomew Price, the professor of natural philosophy. The starting point for these exchanges was the particularly poor results that had come out of the final mathematics examinations in Oxford that December. Ashpitel, as one of the examiners, stood accused of setting questions that were too difficult for the ordinary student, with the consequence that, in Price's view, further mathematical study in Oxford - never as robust as in Cambridge - would be discouraged.

'Nobody could possibly misunderstand what a group is': a study in early twentieth-century group axiomatics.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the so-called 'postulate analysis'-the study of systems of axioms for mathematical objects for their own sake-was regarded by some as a vital part of the efforts to understand those objects. I consider the place of postulate analysis within early twentieth-century mathematics by focusing on the example of a group: I outline the axiomatic studies to which groups were subjected at this time and consider the changing attitudes towards such investigations.