| Summary: | The first Icelandic mathematician to complete a doctoral degree was Ólafur Daníelsson (1877–1957). He first completed a Mag. Scient. degree at the University of Copenhagen to be eligible to teach in the Danish high school system. His university professors were two wellknown geometers: Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen and Julius Petersen, a textbook writer. However, he was not hired as the mathematics teacher at the sole Icelandic high school when he returned home in 1904; the position went to an engineer. Daníelsson then began to prepare his doctoral thesis, which he defended in 1911: Nogle Bemærkninger om algebraiske Flader der kunne bringes til at svare entydigt til en Plan Punkt for Punkt /Several remarks on algebraic surfaces which could have onetoone correspondence to a plane. The thesis was an extension of earlier works by professor Zeuthen and other wellknown scientists of the time: Clebsch, Castelnuevo and Cremona. Meanwhile, to support his growing family, Daníelsson taught pupils privately and composed a little arithmetic textbook, Reikningsbók/Arithmetic, published in 1906. Daníelsson was appointed as the first mathematics teacher at the Iceland Teacher College at its establishment in 1908. The students were mature people who may have been teaching for a number of years but who had not enjoyed schooling themselves. Daníelsson revised his textbook Arithmetic for their needs, republishing it in 1914. In 1919, a mathematics stream was established at Reykjavík High School following Daníelsson’s and his friends’ initiative. Daníelsson was appointed to develop it, aiming for students to become eligible to attend the Polytechnic College in Copenhagen and to take university studies in the sciences. Before that, students had to spend an extra year abroad. At that time Daníelsson began his mission to create high school mathematics textbooks. He wrote four textbooks in the 1920s, out of which two, the third version of Arithmetic and Algebra, became very influential through the midtwentieth century and shaped the ...
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