Beyond the Learned Academy

Description

The tremendous growth of the mathematical sciences in the early modern world was reflected contemporaneously in an increasingly sophisticated level of practical mathematics in fields such as merchants' accounts, instrument making, teaching, navigation, and gauging. In many ways, mathematics shaped the knowledge culture of the age, infiltrating workshops, dockyards, and warehouses, before extending through the factories of the Industrial Revolution to the trading companies and banks of the nineteenth century.

While theoretical developments in the history of mathematics have been made the topic of numerous scholarly investigations, in many cases based around the work of key figures such as Descartes, Huygens, Leibniz, or Newton, practical mathematics, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, has been largely neglected.

The present volume, comprising fifteen essays by leading authorities in the history of mathematics, seeks to fill this gap by exemplifying the richness, diversity, and breadth of mathematical practice from the seventeenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth century.

About the authors:

Philip Beeley studied philosophy, mathematics, and history of exact sciences and technology at the University College of North Wales, and at the Technische Universität in Berlin, gaining his PhD in 1993. He held posts at the University of Hamburg and University of Münster before coming to Oxford in 2007. He is the former President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and is a member of the International Academy of the History of Science.

Christopher Hollings studied mathematics at the University of York, gaining his PhD in 2007. He has held post-doctoral positions in mathematics at the universities of Lisbon and Manchester, before moving to Oxford in 2010 as a researcher in the history of mathematics.

Table of contents

1:Introduction, Philip Beeley and Christopher Hollings
Part I - Navigation, Seafaring, Warfare
2:'Mecanicall Practises Drawne from the Artes Mathematick': the Mathematical Identity of the Elizabethan Navigator John Davis, Jim Bennett
3:Navigation Exams in the Early Modern Period, Margaret E. Schotte
4:Mathematical Examiners at Trinity House: Teaching and Examining Mathematics for Navigation in London During the Long Eighteenth Century, Rebekah Higgitt
5:What Mathematics for Portuguese Military Engineers? From the Class of Fortification to the Military Academy of Lisbon, João Caramalho Domingues
Part II - Professions, Societies, and Cultures of Mathematics
6:Mathematical Men in Humble Life: Philomaths from North-west England as Editors of 'Questions for Answer' Journals, Sloan Evans Despeaux and Brigitte Stenhouse
7:Collection, Use, Dispersal: The Library of Charles Hutton and the Fate of Georgian Mathematics, Benjamin Wardhaugh
8:Mathematics at the Literary and Philosophical Societies, Christopher D. Hollings
9:The Evolution of Actuarial Science to 1848, David R. Bellhouse
Part III - Mathematical Practitioners and their Scientific Milieus
10:Assembling the Scribal Self: Gian Vincenzo Pinelli's Circle and Mathematical Practitioners in the Veneto, c. 1580-1606, Stefano Gulizia
11:Mathematical Businesses: Seventeenth-Century Practitioners and their Academic Friends, Philip Beeley
12:'All of This Was Born on Paper': The Mathematics of Tunnelling in Eighteenth-Century Metallic Mines, Thomas Morel
Part IV - The Practice and Teaching of Mathematics
13:Climbing the Social Ladder: Johannes Faulhaber's Path from Schoolmaster to Fortification Engineer, Ivo Schneider
14:The Difficult Relation of Surveyors with Algebra: The Hundred Mathematical Questions of Cardinael, Albrecht Heeffer
15:The Life Mathematick: John and Euclid Speidell, and the Centrality of Instruments in Seventeenth-Century Pedagogy, Boris Jardine
16:James Thomson Senior and Mathematics at the Belfast Academical Institution, 1814-1832, Mark McCartney