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Mathematicall Lecturer to the Citie of London
The so-called European Age of Discovery is usually considered to have begun as adventurers from the Iberian Peninsular began to venture out into the Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth century, reaching a...
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Correcting navigational errors, the Wright way
Today I’m continuing my occasional series on the English mathematical practitioners of the Early Modern Period. In the post in this series about Edmund Gunter (1581–1626) I quoted the historian of...
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Renaissance garbage – IV
This is the fourthin a series of discussion of selected parts of Paul Strathern’s The Other Renaissance: From Copernicus to Shakespeare, (Atlantic Books, 2023). For more general details on both the...
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The Seaman’s Secrets
Regular readers of my series of posts on English mathematical practitioners in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries might have noticed the name John Davis popping up from time to time....
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Finding your way underground
The Renaissance is a period of intense mathematical activity, but it is not mathematics as somebody who has studied mathematics at school today would recognise it but rather practical mathematics,...
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The equestrian country gentleman, who turned his hand to navigation.
The last third of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century saw the emergence of published handbooks on the art of navigation in England. This trend started with the...
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She sought it here, she sought it there, she found elusive longitude everywhere
In 1995, Dava Sobel, a relatively obscure science writer, published her latest book, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time[1]. Sobel is a...
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Magnetic Variations – II The Borough Brothers
In the previous post I outlined a brief history of magnetism, the magnet, the magnetic compass, and its introduction into navigation with the inherent problems caused by magnetic declination or...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – IX
In the episode in this series on Aristotle I wrote: It is important to note, for the evolution of scientific thought in Europe throughout the centuries after Aristotle, that when applied to nature he...
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Magnetic Variations – III Robert Norman
Robert Norman’s The Newe Attractive (1581) was the most scientific study of magnetism and the magnetic compass between Petrus Peregrinus’ Epistola de magnete from 1269 and William Gilbert’s De Magnete...
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