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6 - Mathematics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2013

Alfred W. Crosby
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Summary

Wherefore in all great works are Clerks so much desired? Wherefore are Auditors so well fed? What causeth Geometricians so highly to be enhaunsed? Why are Astronomers so greatly advanced? Because that by number such things they finde, which else would farre excell mans minde.

Robert Recorde (1540)

Certain Western Europeans of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance began tentatively to consider the possibilities of absolute time and space. The advantages were that absolute properties, by definition, were permanent and universal, which meant that it was worth the effort to measure them and to analyze and manipulate the measurements in various ways. Measurement is numbers, and the manipulation of numbers is mathematics. Thomas Bradwardine, Schoolman and archbishop of Canterbury in the fourteenth century, said, “Whoever then has the effrontery to study physics while neglecting mathematics, should know from the start that he will never make his entry through the portals of wisdom.”

Roger Bacon, John Buridan, Theodoric of Freiberg, Nicole Oresme, and others of a like mind prefigured Kepler and Galileo with their glorification of geometry and, particularly in the case of Oresme, with a conviction that numbers could be imposed where they had previously been thought inappropriate. Oresme (who spent much of his life in Paris and must have heard Charles V's authoritarian clock many times) wrote in a treatise entitled The Geometry of Qualities and Motion that for the measurement of things of “continuous quantity” – for instance, motion or heat – “it is necessary that points, lines, and surfaces, or their properties be imagined….

Type
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The Measure of Reality
Quantification in Western Europe, 1250–1600
, pp. 109 - 126
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

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  • Mathematics
  • Alfred W. Crosby, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book: The Measure of Reality
  • Online publication: 05 October 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107050518.009
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  • Mathematics
  • Alfred W. Crosby, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book: The Measure of Reality
  • Online publication: 05 October 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107050518.009
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Mathematics
  • Alfred W. Crosby, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book: The Measure of Reality
  • Online publication: 05 October 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107050518.009
Available formats
×