Beyond the Learned Academy The Practice of Mathematics, 1600-1850

by Beeley, Philip; Hollings, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780198863953
• ISBN10: 0198863950
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-04-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Christopher Hollings, Departmental Lecturer in Mathematics and its History; Clifford Norton Senior Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics, The Queen's College, University of Oxford,Philip Beeley, Research Fellow and Tutor, Faculty of History and Linacre College, University of Oxford

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. He is the current Vice President of the British Society for 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