Defending Hypatia

Ramus, Savile, and the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical History

By: Robert Goulding

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Paperback | 25 July 2012

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224 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24 x 1.27

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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.

Industry Reviews

From the reviews:

"Having read and enjoyed Goulding's book, I realize how much I did not know about the histories of mathematics that were written and argued over in the sixteenth century. ... I recommend this book as an enduring and intriguing contribution to scholarship. Defending Hypatia is an accomplished piece of scholarship which establishes significant conclusions about Renaissance histories of mathematics and, arguably, about the nature of history itself." (Stephen Pumfrey, British Journal for the History of Science, June, 2012)

"Defending Hypatia is a valuable study contributing to our understanding of Renaissance historiography of mathematics ... . Defending Hypatia is well researched and pleasingly written work. It broadens our understanding of Renaissance historiography of mathematics." (Albrecht Heeffer, Aestimatio, Vol. 9, 2012)

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