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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. After describing the areas where these new instruments came into use, … Continue reading →
Ethan Siegel is a big hitter under the Internet science explainers and popularisers, under the brand, Starts with a Bang. This started many years ago as a blog and has now been part of the Big Think website for many years. His style … Continue reading →
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. It is even said that … Continue reading →
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 … Continue reading →
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. Over the decades, I must have seen it present as such in … Continue reading →
The concept of infinity lies at the heart of calculus, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, also known as the infinitesimal. In fact, in the early days of calculus, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was known … Continue reading →
When somebody wants to dispute something that I say about the history of science or the history of mathematics on social media and can’t actually refute it with facts, they often resort to a comment like the one that is … Continue reading →
Anybody who has been following this series will be aware that in England in the Early Modern Period, mathematical and scientific instruments played a central role in the world of practical mathematics. As we have seen from small beginnings in … Continue reading →
The Renaissance Mathematicus has completed yet another orbit around the Sun and is, as of today, seventeen years old. Seventeen years of churning out history of science blog posts to keep myself occupied and hopefully entertain and maybe inform the … Continue reading →
In the first half of the 1980s I studied mathematics, as a mature student, at the University of Erlangen. In those days a first degree at a German university was a master’s complete with dissertation. In mathematics this was called … Continue reading →