Defending Hypatia

Ramus, Savile, and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History
2010
ISBN: 978-94-007-3214-8
Verlag: Springer Netherlands

Buch, Englisch, Band 25, 5 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 347 g

Reihe: Archimedes

In1713,PierreRem ´ onddeMontmortwrotetothemathematicianNicolasBernoulli: It would bedesirable if someone wanted totake thetrouble toinstruct how and inwhat order the discoveries in mathematics have come about. The histories of painting, of music, of medicine have been written. A good history of mathematics, especially of geometry, would bea much more interesting and useful work. Such a work, ifdone well,could be regarded to some extent as a history of the human mind, since it is in this science, more than in anything else, that man makes known that gift of intelligence that God has given him to rise 1 above all other creatures. Ahalf-centurylater,Jean-EtienneMontuclaprovidedsuchanaccountinhisHistoire des mathem ´ atiques ( rst printed in 1758, and reissued in a greatly expanded form 2 in 1799). Montucla’s 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.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Goulding, Robert

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Wissenschaften: Theorie, Epistemologie, Methodik
• Mathematik | Informatik Mathematik Mathematik Allgemein Geschichte der Mathematik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Wissenschaftstheorie, Wissenschaftsphilosophie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Lineages of Learning.- Ramus and the History of Mathematics.- From Plato to Pythagoras: The Scholae mathematicae.- “To Bring Alexandria to Oxford:” Henry Savile’s 1570 Lectures on Ptolemy.- The Puzzling Lives of Euclid.- Rending Hypatia: The Body of the Elements.