During my first year as a graduate student in the mathematics department at Simon Fraser University (circa 2005-2006), I undertook a reading course, one aim of which was to translate the first part of N. H. Abel’s groundbreaking work on elliptic integrals1 from the French into English. This translation was subsequently published with a short historical and pedagogical introduction in Convergence (an online publication of the Mathematical Association of America, now part of The MAA Mathematical Sciences Digital Library) as ‘Abel on Elliptic Integrals: A Translation‘. One can skip the introduction to the translation and download ‘Studies on Elliptic Functions’ by N. H. Abel directly as a PDF file.
If you would like to learn more about the mathematics of Neils Henrik Abel (1802-1829), you should definitely take a look at Henrik Kragh Sørenen’s PhD dissertation, entitled ‘The Mathematics of Niels Henrik Abel: Continuation and New Approaches in Mathematics During the 1820s‘.
References:
- Abel, N. H., 1827. Recherches sur les fonctions elliptiques. Journal für die reine und angevandte Mathematik, 2. 101-181.
