Article ID: CBB001213939

Routine Controversies: Mathematical Challenges in Mersenne's Correspondence (2013)

unapi

Goldstein, Catherine (Author)


Revue d'Histoire des Sciences
Volume: 66, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 249-273


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “La guerre en lettres: La controverse scientifique dans les correspondances des Lumières”
Language: English

Mathematical challenges punctuate the history of early modern mathematics and accompany some of its most famous controversies, equations in the 1540s to the European dimension of the cycloid problem, a century later. While cultural historians have attempted to contextualize these challenges among contemporary practices, and underlined their analogies with duels or advertisements in a competitive market, historians of mathematics have generally treated them as somewhat childish remnants of a prescientific age, that the advent of modern science and its Baconian ideal of efficient collaboration would soon bring to an end. However, the number of challenges did not decrease with time but rather multiplied inside one of the first scientific organizations aiming at cooperative work : Marin Mersenne's network. This paradox has suggested the focus of this article : to examine the role of challenges in the economy of mathematical exchange (and mathematical creation) in early modern France. Through examples of successful, but also of unsuccessful challenges, we shall see how challenges operated, not only as mises en scène of methodological oppositions, but also, and primarily, as links in a mathematical environment structured inside correspondence around the resolution of problems. This situation also exemplifies how potential controversies may have been a constitutive part of normal scientific activities -- and not their disruption -- while shaping their development in specific, limited directions. from the bitter Tartaglia-Cardano-Ferrari dispute on cubic

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Article Bodenmann, Siegfried; Rey, Anne-Lise (2013) La guerre en lettres: La controverse scientifique dans les correspondances des Lumières. Revue d'Histoire des Sciences (pp. 233-248). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Grosslight, Justin
Palomo, Miguel
Tapp, Christian
Siegmund-Schultze, Reinhard
Senechal, Marjorie
Rashed, Roshdi
Concepts
Mathematics
Correspondence and corresponding
Mathematicians
Controversies and disputes
Scientific priority
Scientific communities; interprofessional relations
Time Periods
17th century
18th century
20th century, early
20th century
19th century
16th century
Places
France
Ukraine
United States
Russia
Italy
Europe
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