Defending Hypatia : Ramus, Savile, and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History
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Bibliographic Information
Defending Hypatia : Ramus, Savile, and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History
（Archimedes : new studies in the history and philosophy of science and technology, v. 25）
Springer, c2010
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-197) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- Introduction Chapter 1: Lineages of Learning Chapter 2: Ramus and the History of Mathematics Chapter 3: From Plato to Pythagoras: The Scholae mathematicae Chapter 4: ''To Bring Alexandria to Oxford''- Henry Savile's1570 Lectures on Ptolemy Chapter 5: The Puzzling Lives of Euclid Chapter 6: Rending Hypatia: The Body of the Elements Conclusion
- Appendices
- Bibliography
by "Nielsen BookData"