Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics.

Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history".

[2] It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science.

[1] Along with Carolyn Eisele of CUNY's Hunter College; C. Doris Hellman of the Pratt Institute, and later CUNY'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 1978, Boyer's widow, the former Marjorie Duncan Nice, a professor of history,[12] established the Carl B. Boyer Memorial Prize, to be awarded annually to a Columbia University non US citizen undergraduate for the best essay on a scientific or mathematical topic.