Beyond the Learned Academy

Download or read book Beyond the Learned Academy written by Philip Beeley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-06 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tremendous growth of the mathematical sciences in the early modern world was reflected contemporaneously in an increasingly sophisticated level of practical mathematics in fields such as merchants' accounts, instrument making, teaching, navigation, and gauging. In many ways, mathematics shaped the knowledge culture of the age, infiltrating workshops, dockyards, and warehouses, before extending through the factories of the Industrial Revolution to the trading companies and banks of the nineteenth century. While theoretical developments in the history of mathematics have been made the topic of numerous scholarly investigations, in many cases based around the work of key figures such as Descartes, Huygens, Leibniz, or Newton, practical mathematics, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, has been largely neglected. The present volume, comprising fifteen essays by leading authorities in the history of mathematics, seeks to fill this gap by exemplifying the richness, diversity, and breadth of mathematical practice from the seventeenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth century.