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Mathematical Book Histories

Printing, Provenance, and Practices of Reading

herausgegeben von: Philip Beeley, Ciarán Mac an Bhaird

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Trends in the History of Science

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

This book both articulates and responds to increasing scholarly interest in the materiality of the book. Taking as its base the unique collection of mathematical books in the Russell Library at Maynooth, it addresses questions related to printing techniques and print culture, book production, provenance, and reading practices. It considers the histories of individual items of the Russell Collection, their previous locations and owners, and explores ways in which annotations, underlinings, hand-drawn diagrams, and the like reveal patterns of reading and usage. Finally, it seeks to elicit more information on a previously under-researched topic: the historical role of mathematics in the extensive network of Irish colleges that once covered Catholic Europe, located in places such as Salamanca, Rome, Douai, and Prague. Alongside delivering important new insights into print culture as a medium for transmitting scientific ideas, Mathematical Book Histories is thus also intended to contribute to a broader understanding of the role and significance of mathematics in the context of clerical instruction and more broadly in the academic tradition of Ireland up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of the volumes in the Russell Library reflect the remarkably rich book-trade that flourished in seventeenth and early eighteenth century Dublin and which was quite distinct from that in London. Booksellers often bought in their wares directly from abroad, with the result that publications could enter collections that did not enter the purview of contemporary English or Scottish scholars in Britain.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Teaching Practices and Mathematical Reform

Frontmatter

Mathematics at Maynooth Until 1850: Teachers, Teaching, and Texts

Abstract

In this chapter, we consider three aspects of mathematics at Maynooth College from its foundation until the mid-nineteenth century: the teachers of mathematics, the material that they taught, and the college’s mathematical collection. To place these in context, we start with a brief overview of events that led to the college’s establishment. Then, interrogating a range of sources, including archival materials and various histories, which feature perspectives on different facets of the college, we consider the lives and contributions of the first four professors charged with teaching mathematics at Maynooth. Their stories, often included in evidence and testimonies for various parliamentary reports, provide insight into the role of mathematics at this institution, and the lasting influence of French textbooks on the mathematics taught. They also allow us to explore student and staff opinions towards the subject. Furthermore, the significance and breadth of the mathematical texts now contained in the Russell Library, reveal that the scientific interests of the staff in question often continued beyond the material that they taught, including topics not endorsed by the Catholic Church.

Ciarán Mac an Bhaird, Barbara McCormack

Christian Wolff’s Elementa Matheseos Universae, Methodology, and Mathematical Education

Abstract

Christian Wolff (1679–1754), well known as a leading philosophical figure in the Enlightenment, has received relatively little attention from historians of mathematics despite his having had a vast mathematical production. The main reason for this neglect is that Wolff was not an original mathematician, his mathematical activity being predominantly devoted to the writing of textbooks and compendia. In this contribution, I shall survey his most successful textbook: Elementa matheseos universae. Originally published in two volumes in 1713–1715, it went through several editions and extensions throughout the eighteenth century, becoming a reference text for the teaching and learning of mathematics in continental Europe until about halfway through the eighteenth century. In my survey, I shall pay particular attention to Wolff’s methodological considerations, advancing the thesis that they should be understood in connection with his pedagogical concerns about teaching mathematics in the most proficient way.

Davide Crippa

Two Books on the Elements of Algebra

Abstract

We examine two early nineteenth century algebra textbooks held in the Russell Library: Bewick Bridge’s Treatise on the Elements of Algebra and James Wood’s Elements of Algebra. We consider their contents, their readership, and their place within nineteenth century mathematical publishing.

Christopher D. Hollings

Ramus Amongst the Jesuits? A Historiographical Inquiry into the Appearance of an Early Ramist Mathematical Text at the Irish College of Salamanca

Abstract

This chapter approaches the Russell Library’s copy of Petrus Ramus’s Euclides (1545) diachronically, combining evidence from the 1558 edition’s intellectual and material construction with an exploration of its biography and subsequent use. Firstly, Euclides is located as a work whose text and paratexts were part of a vibrant mathematical culture as well as a longer lineage of Euclidean adaptations. The edition’s later appearance in an institution overseen by the Society of Jesus then affords both a review of the role attributed to introductory mathematics in competing early modern pedagogical and methodological endeavours, and a means to engage with the novice, early modern readers who encountered such strategies and their attendant texts.

Kevin Gerard Tracey

Anomalies and Mysteries

Frontmatter

Thomas Salusbury’s Lesser Half: The First Volume of Mathematical Collections and Translations

Abstract

Until now, little has been known about Thomas Salusbury’s Mathematical Collections and Translations (1661, 1665), and much of what has been assumed does not stand up to scrutiny. The work is best known for the mystique that surrounds the sole surviving copy of the second part of the second volume, which includes fragments of the first full-length biography of Galileo. Overshadowed by that prized rarity, the book as a whole has been neglected. Now, the discovery of two subscription campaigns spaced several years apart establishes the Mathematical Collections as a work of intellectual heft and consequence. Intended for gentle readers, the two-volume work presents foundational works of mathematical physics in an uncomplicated progression from Archimedes through Galileo to contemporary English natural philosophers. The first subscription campaign, in about 1660, attracted John Wallis, Seth Ward, Christopher Wren, and other eminent mathematicians who founded or shaped the Royal Society. The second campaign, launched soon after the Great Fire, was endorsed by the Society itself. This essay presents the Mathematical Collections as contemporaries experienced it, exposing the translator’s purpose and practice, the identities of those who supported the project, and the frustrations of a collaborative publishing project that persisted for nearly a decade. It argues that the Mathematical Collections is essential to our understanding of the Royal Society and vice-versa. The long-overlooked book offers a unique vantage point to explore organized efforts to advance the new physics during the Society’s formative years.

Constance Hardesty

Two Books and a Plot: When Mathematics Meets History

Abstract

This chapter explores two mathematical books of Spanish origin deposited in the Russell Library within the Salamanca collection, a compendium of administrative documents and books pertaining to the wide network of Irish colleges in the territories of modern-day Spain and Portugal. Through the examination of the two volumes: Juan de Aguilera’s Canones Astrolabii Universalis and Antonio Núñez de Zamora’s Liber de Cometis, written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively, topics such as the influence of astrological concepts in the treatment of astronomical questions, as well as the increasingly sought-after mathematical precision in the literature of the period, are considered. The chapter focuses mostly on the materiality of these books, in particular in the marks of ownership, the significance of annotations in the margins and of interspersed notes on their pages while discussing the collection's provenance and placing it in context with the relevance of mathematical sciences in the Iberian Peninsula in general and the collection's importance in the background of the Jesuit programme of instruction in particular. The analysis of these books, combined with the description of the Salamanca collection's provenance, provides us with a broad perspective that extends beyond mathematics to the social and political aspects of those centuries, which include not only the territories of the Spanish crown, but also the British Isles.

M. Pilar Gil

A Seaworthy Book? Samuel Sturmy’s Mariner’s Magazine (1669) from Conception to Reception

Abstract

The lure of marginalia attracts the scholar, the collector and the librarian alike. In the age of mass digital reproduction, the unique copy acquires a certain aura—and as historical interest turns to reception and social history, marks of use become clues for historian-detectives. In the Russell Library, Maynooth, one volume stands out for the variety of these marks: Samuel Sturmy’s 1669 Mariner’s Magazine has a scored and worn cover, a missing portrait and folding plate, paper instruments cut to shape and held together with string, two much older paper volvelles loosely laid in and, as the catalogue states tantalizingly, ‘extensive ms notes including list of thirteen names’. Owing to a set of fortunate historical and archival circumstances it is possible to give context to this copy by telling the complete story this compendious book of practical mathematics, from its origins in Sturmy’s experiences at sea and his relations with Bristol merchants and London virtuosi, to its printing, reprinting and reception. That is part of my task here. But those extensive manuscript notes lead in another direction, to the fate of this one particular copy, which may have itself gone to sea, across the Atlantic to the early colonies of British America. This, then, is an attempt at a comprehensive account of a single work, and also a single volume.

Boris Jardine

Renewal and Reception

Frontmatter

Jean Prestet’s Éléments des Mathématiques: A Cartesian textbook by a Cartesian Author?

Abstract

Although the idea of ‘Elements of mathematics’ is usually closely linked to that of geometry, some early-modern authors also proposed alternatives. Jean Prestet, a protégé of the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, developed an analytic basis for mathematics, which he presented as largely Cartesian. Prestet’s emphasis on arithmetic and algebra pushed him to subject to proof what had been hitherto seen as obvious facts, to treat symbolic expressions as integers, and to renew and extend Diophantine analysis as well as combinatorial questions. These features, in return, challenged both Prestet’s publisher and Descartes’ viewpoint. These interconnected aspects of Prestet’s treatise, several editions of which are kept in the Russell Library, are discussed here.

Catherine Goldstein

Advancing the ‘Analytick Doctrine’: The Making of John Kersey’s Elements of Algebra

Abstract

Of the three major works on algebra written in the English language in the second half of the seventeenth century, that of the London mathematician John Kersey was by far the most successful. Not only was his Elements of Algebra reprinted more than four times, appearing well into the next century, but it also came to achieve the status of recommended reading at the two English universities. However, up to now little has been known about the author or how his book came to achieve the significance it ultimately acquired. Drawing on previously untapped sources, this chapter traces Kersey’s spectacular rise from lowly steward employed by a noble family in Buckinghamshire to esteemed mathematics teacher and author in the metropolis, and how through his friendship with John Collins he came to write a mathematical work which it was hoped would be able to compete with the best then being published on the continent.

Philip Beeley

Collaboration and Rivalry in the Publishing of Newton’s Mathematics: A Study of Russell Library, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Shelfmark: Sc. 22. 3

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to study a miscellany of mathematical essays gathered in a volume held at the Russell Library, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. The study of this volume will allow us to learn about the strategies of publication and manuscript circulation adopted by mathematicians belonging to Pitcairne’s and Newton’s circles and about the prestige they sought to acquire by showing prowess in the new techniques of the infinitesimal calculus, in particular the so-called ‘method of quadratures’ or ‘inverse method of fluxions’, i.e. the method of integration, as Leibniz and Johann Bernoulli would say. The study of this collection has something to teach us about the collaboration and disputes that characterized mathematics in the early eighteenth century, and that were catalyzed by attempts to publish particular mathematical works of Isaac Newton

Niccolò Guicciardini, Scott Mandelbrote

Anticipating The Analyst—Understanding Berkeley’s Early Mathematical Antagonism Through Contemporary Texts

Abstract

Berkeley is best known to mathematicians and historians of mathematics for his interventions in the history of the Newton-Leibniz calculus. The Analyst was published in 1734 and was the subject of much discussion in the learned world—some of it highly contentious. In this article, the motivations for that critical work are explored through Berkeley’s earlier engagements with mathematicians and the status of their work in contemporary philosophy. It is argued that important anticipations of Berkeley’s animosity towards mathematics can be found in their nascent form in Berkeley’s early responses to contemporary mathematicians and mathematical philosophers, such as John Keill, Bernard Nieuwentijt, Nicolas Malebranche and René Descartes. The Russell Library boasts key holdings and early editions of texts that illustrate this trajectory, and by exploring their interconnections we can better understand the outright mathematical hostility eventually found in The Analyst and its epistolary aftermath.

Clare Moriarty

Introduction

Abstract

This Introduction situates Mathematical Book Histories and its various chapters in the broader context of current work on the history of the book. It considers how a library collection such as that of the Russell Library came to be formed, what the collection can tell us about mathematical teaching practices, and the kind of information on reader engagement that can be gleaned from annotations, marginal working, hand-drawn diagrams, and the like. It also provides useful insights into various aspects of early modern mathematical book production, ranging from initial proposals and subscriptions to the collaborations of booksellers, printers, engravers, correctors, and others. Above all, it shows that as material objects mathematical books can often reveal on close reading more than initially meets the eye.

Philip Beeley, Ciarán Mac an Bhaird

Backmatter

Titel: Mathematical Book Histories
herausgegeben von: Philip Beeley
Ciarán Mac an Bhaird
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-32610-3
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-32609-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32610-3