The Renaissance Mathematicus

Before the proportional compass, there were the proportional dividers, better known as the reduction compass.

Due to other commitments I have hit the pause button and there will be no blog post this week Normal service will be resumed next week!

Once again this will be a post outside of the mainstream of the historical evolution of calculus.

Dennis Danielson and Christopher Graney are two of my favourite historians of astronomy.

We have been looking at the historical development of the method of exhaustion in Ancient Greece and China.

I done fucked up!

Before the publication of Sidereus Nuncius in 1610 launched him into European scientific superstardom, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was a comparatively unknown professor for mathematics at the University of Padua.

Take it to the limit one more time – a history of calculus IV Today, I’m going to deviate slightly from course and talk about something that didn’t actually play a role in the development of calculus.

Every year in August various websites and social media accounts celebrate the anniversary of Galileo’s demonstration of his telescope to the Senate of Venice, they almost invariably get the date wrong.

Popular perception of history are almost always constructed out of half remembered facts, myths and legends and very often have no real relation to what actually took place.

In everyday European discourse there are only a small number of scientists whose names are widely known within the general populus–Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Curie–and even then the people only know very vaguely why these sc…

In the last post in this series, I talked about the rapid expansion in the availability and use of mathematical and scientific instruments in England in the Early Modern Period.

Ethan Siegel is a big hitter under the Internet science explainers and popularisers, under the brand, Starts with a Bang.

According to legend the Pythagoreans were devastated when they discovered that the diagonal of a unit square is an irrational number, because they believed that the natural numbers were the building bricks of the cosmos.

I make no secret of the fact that I think Johannes Kepler was a far more significant scientist at the beginning of the seventeenth century than Galileo Galilei and that he contributed far more to the development of modern science in that century, second o…

In the previous episode I presented what I have always taken to be Euclid’s proof that there is no greatest prime number, an elegant reduction ad absurdum proof.

The concept of infinity lies at the heart of calculus, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, also known as the infinitesimal.