Thomas W. Hawkins Jr. (born 10 January 1938 in Flushing, New York) is an American historian of mathematics.
Hawkins defended his Ph.D. thesis on "The Origins and Early Development of Lebesgue's Theory of Integration" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968 under Robert Creighton Buck. Since 1972 he has been based at Boston University. Hawkins was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1974 at Vancouver and in 1986 at Berkeley.
In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures (length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as magnitude, mass, and probability of events. These seemingly distinct concepts have many similarities and can often be treated together in a single mathematical context. Measures are foundational in probability theory, integration theory, and can be generalized to assume negative values, as with electrical charge. Far-reaching generalizations (such as spectral measures and projection-valued measures) of measure are widely used in quantum physics and physics in general.
The intuition behind this concept dates back to Ancient Greece, when Archimedes tried to calculate the area of a circle. But it was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that measure theory became a branch of mathematics. The foundations of modern measure theory were laid in the works of Émile Borel, Henri Lebesgue, Nikolai Luzin, Johann Radon, Constantin Carathéodory, and Maurice Fréchet, among others. According to Thomas W. Hawkins Jr., "It was primarily through the theory of multiple integrals and, in particular the work of Camille Jordan that the importance of the notion of measurability was first recognized."