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The day that Jonas died
Even fairly ardent scholars of 17th century mathematics are unlikely to have heard of Jonas Moore who died on 25th August 1679. There is no Moore’s theorem or algorithm no branch of mathematics that...
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How far the moon?
Anyone coming to the history of the search for a method to accurately determine longitude through Dava Sobel’s Longitude might be forgiven for thinking that the lunar distance method was just some sort...
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It’s not the Mercator projection; it’s the Mercator-Wright projection!
500 years ago on 5th March 1512 Gerard de Kremer was born in Rupelmonde, in those days a town in the Spanish Netherlands today in Belgium. He is of course much better known through his Latinised...
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Living and dying in Cook’s shadow
As I have no intention of getting up in the middle of the night to stare at the clouds preventing me from seeing the last half hour of the transit of Venus I thought instead I would write a, for the...
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The Virgin Queen was in reality John Dee in drag.
The rumbling you can hear in the background is the HISTSCI HULK playing skittles with some skyscrapers. He’s all riled up and wants to place a big green foot in Carole Jahme’s butt and propel her into...
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Isaac Newton: The Last Lone Genius?
The Friday before last, with much advanced publicity, the BBC broadcast a new documentary film biography of Isaac Newton with the title The Last Magician. This phrase is part of a famous quote by John...
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Cartographical Claptrap!
The AEON magazine website has a long essay[1] by Kurt Hollander simply titled Middle Earth that takes as its subject not the fantasy realm of J. R. R. Tolkien but the equator, the imaginary line...
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Planetary Tables and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide
Since it emerged sometime in the middle of the first millennium BCE the principal function of mathematical astronomy was to provide the most accurate possible predictions of the future positions of the...
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Retelling a story – this time with all the facts
Before 1995 probably only a handful of people interested in the history of navigation had ever heard of the English clockmaker John Harrison and the role he played in the history of attempts to find a...
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Hans Holbein and the Nürnberg–Ingolstadt–Vienna Renaissance mathematical nexus.
There is a strong tendency, particularly in the popular history of science, to write about or present scientists as individuals. This leads to a serious distortion of the way that science develops and...
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Measure for measure
The Brexit vote in the UK has produced a bizarre collection of desires of those Leavers eager to escape the poisonous grasp of the Brussels’ bureaucrats. At the top of their list is a return of the...
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One line to rule them all
A standard concept in the modern politico-military terminology is that of mission creep. This describes the, in the last sixty or seventy years often observed, phenomenon of a military intervention by...
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The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of...
The title of this post is the subtitle of Dava Sobel’s Longitude, her mega bestselling account of the life and work of the eighteenth-century clock maker John Harrison; probably the biggest selling...
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All at sea
As I’ve said more than once in the past, mathematics as a discipline as we know it today didn’t exist in the Early Modern Period. Mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, cartography, navigation,...
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The House of Blaeu vs.The House of Hondius – The Battle of the Globes and...
There is a South to North trajectory in the evolution of the modern mathematical cartography in Europe over the two hundred years between fourteen hundred and sixteen hundred. Ptolemaic mathematical...
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Getting names right is rather important in the history of science
“Have you seen my new Rolls Royce?” “But that’s not a Rolls Royce; it’s a Fiat Bambino!” “It’s got four wheels, an internal combustion engine and it gets you from a to b so it’s a Rolls Royce, isn’t...
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Marine chronometer, lunar distance method or something else altogether?
Trying to find a method to determine longitude at sea was one of the greatest technical problems of the Early Modern Period. Quite a wide-range of ideas were floated of which the most were either...
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Spicing up the evolution of the mathematical sciences
When we talk about the history of mathematics one thing that often gets forgotten is that from its beginnings right up to the latter part of the Early Modern Period almost all mathematics was developed...
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On Twitter this morning physicist and science writer Graham Farmelo inadvertently drew my attention to a reader’s letter in The Guardian from Sunday by a Collin Moffat. Upon reading this load of old...
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Finding your way on the Seven Seas in the Early Modern Period
I spend a lot of my time trying to unravel and understand the complex bundle that is Renaissance or Early Modern mathematics and the people who practiced it. Regular readers of this blog should by now...
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