Along with
Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's
Hunter College;
C. Doris Hellman of the
Pratt Institute, and later
City University of New York's
Queens College; and
Lynn Thorndike of Columbia University, Boyer was instrumental in the 1953 founding of the Metropolitan New York Section of the
History of Science Society. In 1954, Boyer was the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship to further his work in the history of science, in particular, the history of the study of rainbows. Boyer wrote the books
The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959), with a foreword was written by
Richard Courant, which was originally published as
The Concepts of the Calculus (1939);
History of Analytic Geometry (1956); and
The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959). Boyer published
A History of Mathematics in 1968. After he died in 1976,
Uta Merzbach, a historian of mathematics at the
Smithsonian Institution, took responsibility for revising and updating the text. The second edition appeared in 1991, with a foreword by
Isaac Asimov. She released the third edition in 2011. Reviewers praised this book for its broad and accessible coverage of interesting developments from antiquity to the modern era. ==Personal life and death==