Related papers: Gerberto e l'Astronomia
This paper summarises briefly and in English some of the results of the book Hoffmann: Hipparchs Himmelsglobus, Springer, 2017 that had to be written in German. The globe of Hipparchus is not preserved. For that reason, it has been a source…
Understanding the nature of time remains a key unsolved problem in science. Newton in the Principia asserted an absolute universal time that {\it `flows equably'}. Hamilton then proposed a mathematical unification of space and time within…
Inspired by the relation between the algebra of complex numbers and plane geometry, William Rowan Hamilton sought an algebra of triples for application to three dimensional geometry. Unable to multiply and divide triples, he invented a…
Steven Weinberg was a giant of late 20th Century physics on whose shoulders we stand while groping for the science of the 21st Century. This article provides a too-brief summary of a selection of his many achievements -- eight decades of…
We agree with the interpretation of W. Schlosser, that the Nebra Sky Disc is a reminder of a method of determining a start date (and possibly also an end date) of the farming year. We extend this interpretation. We think that we found the…
While geometry with transcendental curves, like the Quadratrix of Hippias and the Spiral of Archimedes, played a significant role in our modern developments of geometry and algebra. The investigation has fallen off in the modern era despite…
One of the main difficulties that students have in learning astronomy topics is that they fail to relate theoretical information with what they experience in the world around them. The construction by students of a conceptual framework in…
Astronomical interest within the current Colombian territory has its roots in the Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada (1783-1813), which stimulated the creation of an astronomical observatory in 1803, the first one…
Gerhard Hochschild's contribution to the development of mathematics in the XX century is succinctly surveyed. We start with a personal and mathematical biography, and then consider with certain detail his contributions to algebraic groups…
The relationship between spinors and Clifford (or geometric) algebra has long been studied, but little consistency may be found between the various approaches. However, when spinors are defined to be elements of the even subalgebra of some…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
The University of Strasbourg, fundamentally humanistic since its creation, has a complicated history, being sometimes German, sometimes French through the ages. If one focus, from 1871, on the area of mathematics, we can identify two…
In no other epoch of Western history like in the Middle Ages, cosmology was so key an element of culture and, one way or another, the motion of the heavens ended up impregnating the literature of that time. Among the most noteworthy poets…
Aristotle was the first to declare himself in the class of natural philosophers ({\em physiologoi}) and he was the first physicist because he spelled out the first definitions of some basic physical concepts. Moreover, he was the first…
The studies of Bonaventura Cavalieri's indivisibles by Giusti, Andersen, Mancosu and others provide a comprehensive picture of Cavalieri's mathematics, as well as of the mathematical objections to it as formulated by Paul Guldin and other…
A re-investigation of the parapegma of Euktemon (5th century BC, Athens), based on the assumption that some star observations may in fact have been calculated rather than directly observed. The calculation follows Pliny, Natural History…
Inspired by the one-hundredth anniversary of the seminal works of Stern and Gerlach, our contribution is a proposal of how to use their famous experiment in a more contemporary perspective. Our main idea is to re-cast the experiment in the…
After presenting the main characteristics of the Sky of Salamanca, we analyse whether what is represented in it is motivated by astrological or astronomical considerations. We will see that the astrological explanation based on the system…
Contemporary astronomy is undergoing a revolution, perhaps even more important than that which took place with the advent of radioastronomy in the 1960s, and then the opening of the sky to observations in the other electromagnetic…
We are experiencing a period of extreme intellectual effervescence in the area of cosmology. A huge volume of observational data in unprecedented quantity and quality and a more consistent theoretical framework propelled cosmology to an era…