Description
Book SynopsisThe 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
Table of Contents1: Philip Beeley and Christopher Hollings: Introduction Part I - Navigation, Seafaring, Warfare 2: Jim Bennett: 'Mecanicall Practises Drawne from the Artes Mathematick': the Mathematical Identity of the Elizabethan Navigator John Davis 3: Margaret E. Schotte: Navigation Exams in the Early Modern Period 4: Rebekah Higgitt: Mathematical Examiners at Trinity House: Teaching and Examining Mathematics for Navigation in London During the Long Eighteenth Century 5: João Caramalho Domingues: What Mathematics for Portuguese Military Engineers? From the Class of Fortification to the Military Academy of Lisbon Part II - Professions, Societies, and Cultures of Mathematics 6: Sloan Evans Despeaux and Brigitte Stenhouse: Mathematical Men in Humble Life: Philomaths from North-west England as Editors of 'Questions for Answer' Journals 7: Benjamin Wardhaugh: Collection, Use, Dispersal: The Library of Charles Hutton and the Fate of Georgian Mathematics 8: Christopher D. Hollings: Mathematics at the Literary and Philosophical Societies 9: David R. Bellhouse: The Evolution of Actuarial Science to 1848 Part III - Mathematical Practitioners and their Scientific Milieus 10: Stefano Gulizia: Assembling the Scribal Self: Gian Vincenzo Pinelli's Circle and Mathematical Practitioners in the Veneto, c. 1580-1606 11: Philip Beeley: Mathematical Businesses: Seventeenth-Century Practitioners and their Academic Friends 12: Thomas Morel: 'All of This Was Born on Paper': The Mathematics of Tunnelling in Eighteenth-Century Metallic Mines Part IV - The Practice and Teaching of Mathematics 13: Ivo Schneider: Climbing the Social Ladder: Johannes Faulhaber's Path from Schoolmaster to Fortification Engineer 14: Albrecht Heeffer: The Difficult Relation of Surveyors with Algebra: The Hundred Mathematical Questions of Cardinael 15: Boris Jardine: The Life Mathematick: John and Euclid Speidell, and the Centrality of Instruments in Seventeenth-Century Pedagogy 16: Mark McCartney: James Thomson Senior and Mathematics at the Belfast Academical Institution, 1814-1832
