相关论文: Historical Chinese efforts to determine longitude …
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…
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…
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 use of the observed positions of celestial bodies to determine the location of a navigator and to direct vessels, was an aspiration of ancient seafarers. Various peoples, in the Mediterranean as much as in the Indian Ocean, in China as…
When studying the history of mathematical symbols, one finds that the development of mathematical symbols in China is a significant piece of Chinese history; however, between the beginning of mathematics and modern day mathematics in China,…
The shift toward high-quality urbanization has brought increased attention to the issue of "urban villages", which has become a prominent social problem in China. However, there is a lack of available geospatial data on urban villages,…
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…
How nations shape the scientific frontier matters for technological competition, but standard metrics, including publication counts, citations, and disruption indices, look backward and fail to distinguish between fundamentally different…
We introduce the south-pointing chariot, an intriguing mechanical device from ancient China. We use its ability to keep track of a global direction as it travels on an arbitrary path as a tool to explore the geometry of curved surfaces.…
The first approach to the history of mathematics in China led by Li Yan (1892--1963) and Qian Baocong (1892--1974) featured discovering {\it what} mathematics had been done in China's past. From the 1970s on, Wu Wen-tsun and others shifted…
Emerging trends in smartphones, online maps, social media, and the resulting geo-located data, provide opportunities to collect traces of people's socio-economical activities in a much more granular and direct fashion, triggering a…
In earlier centuries kings and governments employed astrologists to help them take the best decisions. Present-day governments no longer employ astrologists but still have no clear analytical tool to replace them. Over the past two decades…
Citizen science refers to scientific research conducted or participated by non-professional scientists (such as hobbyists or members from the general public). Citizen astronomy is a classic example of citizen science. Citizen astronomers…
This article presents how ship trajectories have been built from historical sources dealing with maritime trade in the 18th century. It first summarizes the method for building the routes, and qualifying the uncertainty level linked to each…
Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…
We show that from historical record and mathematic analysis, "fractal expressions" may have been a conscious pursuit at least one thousand years ago as an element of beauty in ancient Chinese calligraphy.
Robotic Exploration has evolved rapidly in the past two decades as new and more complex techniques have been created to explore unknown regions efficiently. Exciting advancements in exploration, autonomous navigation, and sensor technology…
As an important symbol of civilization and culture, architectures originally were built for sheltering human beings from weather disasters and therefore should be affected by climate change, particularly the associated change in the…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
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,…