EtienneMontuclaprovidedsuchanaccountinhisHistoire des mathem ¿ atiques ( rst printed in 1758, and reissued in a greatly expanded form 2 in 1799). Montucläs great work is generally acknowledged as the rst genuine history of mathematics. According to modern historians, previous attempts at such a history had amounted to little more than collections of anecdotes, biographies or exhaustive bibliographies: ¿jumbles of names, dates and titles,¿ as one writer in the 3 Dictionary of Scienti c Biography characterizes them. Montucla, in contrast, was thoroughly animated by the Enlightenment project expressed in de Montmort¿s l- ter. In his Histoire he set out to provide a philosophicalhistory of the ¿development 4 of the human mind,¿ as he himself described it.