author
1853–1934
A clear-minded mathematics teacher and textbook writer, he turned advanced subjects like elliptic functions, geometry, and optics into books meant to help students actually learn. His work reflects the practical, classroom-focused spirit of American math education around the turn of the twentieth century.
Arthur Latham Baker was an American mathematician and educator, born in 1853 and remembered for a group of instructional books published from the 1890s into the early 1900s. Reliable library records link him with works on elliptic functions, graphic algebra, solid geometry, quaternions, and optics, showing a writer deeply interested in explaining difficult ideas in a usable way.
The surviving title pages of his books identify him as a Ph.D. and place him at Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, New York, where he served in mathematics. That school connection helps explain the tone of his books: even when the topics were advanced, they were written as teaching tools rather than purely abstract research.
Among the works most often associated with him are Elliptic Functions: An Elementary Text-Book for Students of Mathematics, Graphic Algebra, The Elements of Solid Geometry, The Art of Geometry, Quaternions as the Result of Algebraic Operations, and Thick-Lens Optics. He died in 1934, leaving behind a body of public-domain writing that still circulates through library and archive collections.