Article ID: CBB127439302

Gauss and the Mathematical Background to Standardisation (2020)

unapi

Our aim is to explore the links between standardisation, the quantifying spirit, and the discipline mathematics. To do so, we consider the work of Gauss, renowned as a pure mathematician, but professionally an astronomer, and one heavily engaged with all kinds of measuring and precision initiatives. He contributed to the mathematical correction of data with the method of least squares; to observations of high precision in his geodetic work; to the introduction of absolute measures in his collaborations with Weber on terrestrial magnetism; and to the rationalisation of weights and measures in the state of Hannover. Ultimately, the question is to what extent such precision and standardisation activities may have been rooted in the mathematical way of thinking. Mathematics in our tradition has had a strong contemplative bias (theory, theorein in Greek means to contemplate), but it’s a fact that mathematics has always had a non-eliminable technical side.

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Article Javier Ordóñez; Antonio Sánchez (2020) Introduction: Standards in the History of Contemporary Science. HOST: Journal of History of Science and Technology (pp. 1-5). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Archibald, Tom
Beaud, Jean-Pierre
Bien, Reinhold
Djebbar, Ahmed
Ebbinghaus, Heinz-Dieter
Ekeland, Ivar
Journals
Archive for History of Exact Sciences
Acta Historiae Rerum Naturalium necnon Technicarum
Annalen der Physik
Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology
British Journal for the History of Science
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Publishers
Oxford University Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Pickering & Chatto
Shandong jiao yu chu ban she [Shandong Education Press]
Springer
Springer International
Concepts
Mathematics
Applied mathematics
Metrology
Standards and standardization
Quantification
Measurement
People
Gauss, Carl Friedrich
Foerster, Wilhelm
Gruson, Johann Philipp
Hansteen, Christopher
Hutton, Charles
Laplace, Pierre Simon
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
17th century
16th century
Places
Great Britain
China
Europe
France
Germany
Italy
Institutions
International Bureau of Weights and Measures
Convention du mètre (1875)
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