IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB006065321

Practical Mathematicians and Mathematical Practice in Later Seventeenth-Century London (2019)

British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 52
Issue: 2
Pages: 225-248

URI: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-of-science/article/practical-mathematicians-and-mathematical-practice-in-later-seventeenthcentury-london/CB8DABA63754F007A51AAE9491D4840A

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087419000207

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Scientific communities; interprofessional relations Science and society Merchants Algebra Arithmetic Booksellers and bookselling Printing Instrument makers Mathematics 17th century London (England)

Mathematical practitioners in seventeenth-century London formed a cohesive knowledge community that intersected closely with instrument-makers, printers and booksellers. Many wrote books for an increasingly numerate metropolitan market on topics covering a wide range of mathematical disciplines, ranging from algebra to arithmetic, from merchants’ accounts to the art of surveying. They were also teachers of mathematics like John Kersey or Euclid Speidell who would use their own rooms or the premises of instrument-makers for instruction. There was a high degree of interdependency even beyond their immediate milieu. Authors would cite not only each other, but also practitioners of other professions, especially those artisans with whom they collaborated closely. Practical mathematical books effectively served as an advertising medium for the increasingly self-conscious members of a new emerging professional class. Contemporaries would talk explicitly of ‘the London mathematicians’ in distinction to their academic counterparts at Oxford or Cambridge. The article takes a closer look at this metropolitan knowledge culture during the second half of the century, considering its locations, its meeting places and the mathematical clubs which helped forge the identity of its practitioners. It discusses their backgrounds, teaching practices and relations to the London book trade, which supplied inexpensive practical mathematical books to a seemingly insatiable public.

...More

Included in

Article Jim Bennett; Rebekah Higgitt (2019) London 1600–1800: Communities of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice. British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 183-196). unapi

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB006065321/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin; (2019)
‘A Place of Great Trust to Be Supplied by Men of Skill and Integrity’: Assayers and Knowledge Cultures in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century London (/isis/citation/CBB737897913/)

Book Long, D. A.; (2013)
“At the sign of Atlas”: The Life and Work of Joseph Moxon, a Restoration Polymath (/isis/citation/CBB001551656/)

Article Rebekah Higgitt; (2019)
‘Greenwich Near London’: The Royal Observatory and Its London Networks in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (/isis/citation/CBB752672306/)

Book Alexandra Hill; (2018)
Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557–1640. An Analysis of the Stationersʼ Company Register (/isis/citation/CBB397035713/)

Article Francisco Gómez-García; Pedro J. Herrero-Piñeyro; Antonio Linero-Bas; Ma. Rosa Massa-Esteve; Antonio Mellado-Romero; (2021)
The six books of Diophantus’ Arithmetic increased and reduced to specious: the lost manuscript of Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) (/isis/citation/CBB347141746/)

Article Anna Winterbottom; (2019)
An Experimental Community: The East India Company in London, 1600–1800 (/isis/citation/CBB821547552/)

Book Stedall, Jacqueline A.; (2011)
From Cardano's Great Art to Lagrange's Reflections: Filing a Gap in the History of Algebra (/isis/citation/CBB001321014/)

Article Martin Frank; (2014)
Ettore Ausonio, predecessore di Giovanni Battista Benedetti come matematico al servizio del Duca di Savoia (/isis/citation/CBB232360533/)

Article Sebouh D. Aslanian; (2014)
Port Cities and Printers: Reflections on Early Modern Global Armenian Print Culture (/isis/citation/CBB607089726/)

Book Marco Panza; (2021)
Modes de l’analyse et formes de la géométrie (/isis/citation/CBB887755156/)

Article Rey, Javier Docampo; (2006)
Reading Luca Pacioli's Summa in Catalonia: An Early 16th-Century Catalan Manuscript on Algebra and Arithmetic (/isis/citation/CBB000670254/)

Book Yong, Lam Lay; Ang, Tian Se; (2004)
Fleeting Footsteps: Tracing the Conception of Arithmetic and Algebra in Ancient China (/isis/citation/CBB000470192/)

Article Boucard, Jenny; (2013)
Cyclotomie et formes quadratiques dans l'œuvre arithmétique d'Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1829--1840) (/isis/citation/CBB001211763/)

Article Terdimou, Maria; (2007)
Geometry Versus Algebra. Ancient Greek and Western Mathematics:Parallel or Intersecting Options by the Greek Scholars of the 18th Century? (/isis/citation/CBB000931865/)

Article Norman Biggs; (2021)
Linear Programming from Fibonacci to Farkas (/isis/citation/CBB910977328/)

Article Sabine Rommevaux–Tani; (2016)
Michael Stifel, lecteur de la "Practica arithmetice" de Gerolamo Cardano (/isis/citation/CBB465327452/)

Article Lambert, Kevin; (2013)
A Natural History of Mathematics: George Peacock and the Making of English Algebra (/isis/citation/CBB001320192/)

Article Echelbarger, Charles; (2013)
Hume on the Objects of Mathematics (/isis/citation/CBB001201145/)

Chapter Ilana Wartenberg; (2012)
The Place of Ibn al-Ahdab's Epistle of the Number in the Diffusion of Arabic Mathematics in Hebrew in Medieval Europe (/isis/citation/CBB906698085/)

Article Eleonora Sammarchi; (2019)
Les collections de problèmes algébriques dans le Qisṭās al-muʻādala fīʻilm al-jabr wa’l-muqābala d’al-Zanjānī (/isis/citation/CBB505707989/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}