I am interested in the mathematics used by physicists in the 19^th century, and the interaction of both with the wider cultural context. I have recently been exploring some of these as cases of epistemic injustice. I support work on the MacTutor archive of mathematicians developed by my colleagues Edmund Robertson and John O’Connor.

I am an experienced supervisor at Masters and PhD level: recently I have been supervising projects in 17th/18th century Scottish mathematics, and female mathematicians at St Andrews around 1900. Together with Beth Barlow, an undergraduate Laidlaw Scholar, I am developing a corpus of accounts of the way ordinary people in the past encountered, reacted to, and used, mathematical ideas; this will be available in rdf form for data linking.

I am an executive committee member of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics, elected by the International Mathematical Union. I am a Council member of the British Society for the History of Mathematics.

I have taught part time for the UK Open University for over 30 years. For 8 years I juggled teaching and history of mathematics research with educational research into open educational resources.

Personal website (including preprints of some papers not available below): https://isobelf.wordpress.com/about/