Symbols and Things (eBook)

Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Kevin Lambert (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021
457 Seiten
University of Pittsburgh Press (Verlag)
978-0-8229-8841-0 (ISBN)

Infos

<b>An Exploration of</b><b> the </b><b>E</b><b>ssential </b><b>M</b><b>aterial </b><b>P</b><b>ractices, </b><b>N</b><b>ew </b><b>T</b><b>echnologies, and </b><b>P</b><b>aper </b><b>T</b><b>ools British </b><b>M</b><b>athematicians</b><b> Relied on</b><b> in the </b><b>E</b><b>ighteenth and </b><b>N</b><b>ineteenth </b><b>C</b><b>enturies</b>

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In the steam-powered mechanical age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians depended on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Though not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book—from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton—relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues. The letters they exchanged, together with the equations, diagrams, tables, or pictures that filled their manuscripts and publications, were all tangible traces of abstract ideas that extended mathematicians into their social and material environment. Each chapter of this book explores a thing, or assembling of things, mathematicians needed to do their work—whether a textbook, museum, journal, library, diagram, notebook, or letter—all characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century British taskscape, but also representative of great change to a discipline brought about by an industrialized world in motion.

Autor

<b>Kevin Lambert</b> is a historian of science and mathematics and professor in the liberal studies department at California State University, Fullerton.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.10.2021
• Reihe/Serie: Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century
• Verlagsort: PIttsburgh
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik ► Geschichte der Mathematik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: abstract mathematics • George Green • Georgian mathematicians • History of Mathematics • nineteenth-century mathematics • Victorian mathematicians • William Rowan Hamilton
• ISBN-10: 0-8229-8841-0 / 0822988410
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8841-0 / 9780822988410