Related papers: Christopher Clavius astronomer and mathematician
This paper is proposing some physics problems from a book, De Motu Gravium Naturaliter Descendentium, written by Evangelista Torricelli, with the aim of showing how physics was taught in a university, that of Pisa, in the 17th century.
Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765) is the eminent Russian polymath and a towering figure of the European Enlightenment. This English translation of his seminal work Discourse on Greater Accuracy of Navigation concludes the series of English…
Most scientific research begins in the context of the then-contemporary state of knowledge of the field and moves toward a deeper understanding of the subject. This colloquium presents the Arecibo telescope$^{'}$s contribution to radio…
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Andr\'e Tacquet, S.J. briefly discussed a scientific argument regarding the structure of a Copernican universe, and commented on Galileo Galilei's discussion of that same argument -- Galileo's…
The mid-17th century saw unprecedented scientific progress. With the Middle Ages well and truly over, the Scientific Revolution had begun. However, scientific advancement does not always proceed along well-planned trajectories. Chance…
The dissemination of natural philosophy in the 18th-century, which was based primarily on Newton's pioneering work in mechanics, optics and astrophysics, is presented as seen through a remarkable textbook written by a little known Irish…
Leonhard Euler, the most prolific mathematician in history, contributed to advance a wide spectrum of topics in celestial mechanics. At the Saint Petersburg Observatory, Euler observed sunspots and tracked the movements of the Moon.…
After Galileo's publication of the Sidereus Nuncius in 1610, Giovanni Battista Agucchi obtained in 1611 an estimate of the orbital periods of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter using the figures published in the book. The article shows how…
This article reflects on the life and mathematical contributions of Pierre Cartier, a distinguished figure in 20th- and 21st-century mathematics. As a key member of the Bourbaki collective, Cartier played a pivotal role in the formalization…
From the 16th to the 20th century, Western mathematics had a dramatic impact in China. Firstly they triggered lexical developments, e.g. in the field of geometry. Later, in the 19the century, even though Li Shanlan had invented his own…
Supportive attitudes can bring to a blossoming science, while neglect can quickly make science absent from everyday life and provide a very primitive view of the world. We compare one important Greek achievement, the computation of the…
Hipparchus is considered the greatest astronomer of antiquity. However, his fame is due, more than to what he has done, or said, or written, to what the scientists of some generation or of a few cen-turies later have written of him: above…
This book is a critical edition of a treatise of astronomy by the Syrian scholar Ibn al-\v{S}\=atir (1304-1375). The Arabic text has been established on the basis of several manuscript copies, and it has been translated into French; a…
Annual astrological calendars, practica and prognostications became widespread publications in Europe after the invention of printing presses in the 15th century. Using the national language instead of Latin, the language of the scientists,…
Great opportunities arise for teaching physics, astronomy, and their histories when new discoveries are made that involve concepts accessible to students at every level. Such an opportunity currently exists thanks to the fact that notes…
G. B. Riccioli's 1651 Almagestum Novum contains a table of diameters of stars measured by Riccioli and his associates with a telescope. These telescopically measured star diameters are spurious, caused by the diffraction of light waves…
Almost half a century before Einstein expounded his general theory of relativity, the English mathematician William Kingdon Clifford argued that space might not be Euclidean and proposed that matter is nothing but a small distortion in that…
In 1693, Gottfried Whilhelm Leibniz published in the Acta Eruditorum a geometrical proof of the fundamental theorem of the calculus. During his notorious dispute with Isaac Newton on the development of the calculus, Leibniz denied any…
We use contemporary mathematical notation to describe the method for determining the age of the ecclesiastical moon as mandated by pope Gregory XIII and elaborated in the book of Christopher Clavius \emph{Romani calendarii explicatio}. The…
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…