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High-level Chinese cartographic developments predate European innovations by several centuries. Whereas European cartographic progress -- and in particular the search for a practical solution to the perennial "longitude problem" at sea --…
In the 17th Century, the Dutch Republic played an important role in the scientific revolution. Much of the correspondence among contemporary scientists and their associates is now digitally available through the ePistolarium webtool,…
Following Columbus' voyages to the Americas, Castilian (Spanish) and Portuguese rulers engaged in heated geopolitical competition, which was eventually reconciled through a number of treaties that divided the world into two unequal…
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle was one of the most important scientists at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences during the first period when Euler was working there. Euler was helping him in his work on astronomy and in geography. In this…
During the summer of 1837 Christian Ludwig Gerling, a former student of Carl Friedrich Gau{\ss}'s, organized the world wide first determination of the deflection of the vertical in longitude. From a mobile observatory at the Frauenberg near…
The late-sixteenth century witnessed a major expansion of Dutch shipping activity from northern European waters to the Indian Ocean and beyond. At a time when the Renaissance had just arrived on the North Sea's shores, scientist-scholars,…
The Sun has been observed through a telescope for four centuries. However, its study made a prodigious leap at the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of photography and spectroscopy, then at the beginning of the following…
In 1492, for the first time, an unknown ocean opened up before sailors: weeks of navigation and no idea how to pinpoint their location. Since ancient times, navigators had known how to determine latitude by using the North Star, but the…
The evolution of infrastructure networks such as roads and streets are of utmost importance to understand the evolution of urban systems. However, datasets describing these spatial objects are rare and sparse. The database presented here…
The 16-year old Blaise Pascal found a way to determine if 6 points lie on a conic using a straightedge. Nearly 400 years later, we develop a method that uses a straightedge to check whether 10 points lie on a plane cubic curve.
The sphericity of the form of the Earth was questioned around the year 1687, primarily, by Isaac Newton who deduced from his theory of universal gravitation that the Earth has the form of a spheroid flattened at the poles and elongated at…
Longitude determination at sea gained increasing commercial importance in the late Middle Ages, spawned by a commensurate increase in long-distance merchant shipping activity. Prior to the successful development of an accurate marine…
In 1919, Eddington and Dyson led two famous expeditions to measure the bending of light during a total solar eclipse. The results of this effort led to the first experimental confirmation of Einstein's General Relativity and contributed to…
Prior to modern Earth observation technologies, historical maps provide a unique record of long-term urban transformation and offer a lens on the evolving identity of cities. However, extracting consistent and fine-grained change…
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…
During the summer of 1837 Christian Ludwig Gerling, a former student of Carl Friedrich Gauss, organized the world wide first determination of a vertical deflection in longitude. From a mobile observatory at the Frauenberg close to Marburg…
The reconstruction of geographical data over a century, allows to figuring out the evolution of the French railway landscape, and how it has been impacted by major events (eg.: WWII), or longer time span processes : industry outsourcing,…
By the twelfth century, northern European scholars gradually embraced Arabic innovations in science and technology. England naturally developed into a significant centre of the new learning in western Europe. Hereford, and specifically its…
This paper frames calculus as a global, centuries-long development rather than a subject that began only with Newton and Leibniz. Drawing on ideas from Greek, Indian, Islamic, and later European mathematics, it highlights how concepts like…
When visiting the Museum of Modern Art's special exhibit ''van Gogh and the Colors of the Night (New York, USA, 2008)'' I was impressed by the artist's effort to paint and write about landscapes and life scenes at night. At the same time a…