Related papers: Materials Science in Ancient Rome
In 1615 Paolo A. Foscarini, a Carmelite monk lived in a monastery of south Italy near Cosenza (Calabria), published a Trattato which, at variance to what was common at the time, has not been written in Latin, but in volgare, the ancient…
Starting from the Italian unification in 1861, we describe the role of mathematics teaching in the Italian system of education giving an account of the main features of Italian mathematics education, and referring to the official syllabi,…
Comparisons and analogies are drawn between materials ferroic glasses and conventional spin glasses, in terms of both experiment and theoretical modelling, with inter-system conceptual transfers leading to suggestions of further issues to…
Solids are rigid, which means that when left undisturbed, their structures are nearly static. It follows that these structures depend on history -- but it is surprising that they hold readable memories of past events. Here we review the…
One of humanity's earliest mathematical inquiries might have involved the geometric patterns in plants. The arrangement of leaves on a branch, seeds in a sunflower, and spines on a cactus exhibit repeated spirals, which appear with an…
This book is a valuable introduction to astrophyscial plasmas and fluids for graduate students of astronomy preparing either for a research career in the field or just aspiring to achieve a decent degree of familiarity with 99% of the…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Textual and archaeological sources are used to provide a synoptic vision of the universe in India. This vision was based on an assumed equivalence of the outer and the inner cosmoses and it is embodied in architecture, music, and art. It…
This article has his origin in some lectures given at the University of Bologna, inside an interdisciplinary program of mathematics, history of science, physics and philosophy. Since they are at the junction of these fields, movement and…
The abundance patterns of metal-poor stars provide us a wealth of chemical information about various stages of cosmic chemical evolution. In particular, these stars allow us to study the formation and evolution of the elements, and the…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
We present an overview of the differential geometry of curves and surfaces using examples from soft matter as illustrations. The presentation requires a background only in vector calculus and is otherwise self-contained.
Bibliographic data is a rich source of information that goes beyond the use cases of location and citation -- it also encodes both cultural and technological context. For most of its existence, the scholarly record has changed slowly and…
In this work, an attempt is presented to understand the contribution of Galileo Galilei in the field of the History of Ideas, from the moment he points a spyglass to the sky. For that, it was previously necessary that Giotto painting the…
A short history of prisms from Lucius Anneus Seneca to George Ravenscroft.
We examine connections between the mathematics behind methods of drawing geographical maps due, on the one hand to Marinos and Ptolemy (1st-2nd c. CE) and on the other hand to Delisle and Euler (18th century). A recent work by the first two…
Despite the extensive amount of scholarly work done on Indian mathematics in the last 200 years, the conditions under which it originated and evolved is still not clear. Often, one reads the ancient texts with the present concepts and…
Understanding the origins and distribution of matter in the Universe is one of the most important quests in physics and astronomy. Themes range from astro-particle physics to chemical evolution in the Galaxy to cosmic nucleosynthesis and…
This paper is based on a course given by the author at the University of Rome ``La Sapienza'' in the Academic year 2000/2001. The intended aim of the course was to rapidly introduce, although not in an exhaustive way, the non-expert PhD…
Nature hosts a wealth of materials showcasing intricate structures intertwining order, disorder, and hierarchy, delivering resilient multifunctionality surpassing perfect crystals or simplistic disordered materials. The engineering of such…