Download or read book Correspondence and Papers of Edmond Halley written by Edmond Halley and published by . This book was released on 1932 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Calculus Wars written by Jason Socrates Bardi and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now regarded as the bane of many college students' existence, calculus was one of the most important mathematical innovations of the seventeenth century. But a dispute over its discovery sewed the seeds of discontent between two of the greatest scientific giants of all time -- Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Today Newton and Leibniz are generally considered the twin independent inventors of calculus, and they are both credited with giving mathematics its greatest push forward since the time of the Greeks. Had they known each other under different circumstances, they might have been friends. But in their own lifetimes, the joint glory of calculus was not enough for either and each declared war against the other, openly and in secret. This long and bitter dispute has been swept under the carpet by historians -- perhaps because it reveals Newton and Leibniz in their worst light -- but The Calculus Wars tells the full story in narrative form for the first time. This vibrant and gripping scientific potboiler ultimately exposes how these twin mathematical giants were brilliant, proud, at times mad and, in the end, completely human.

Download or read book The National Union Catalog Pre 1956 Imprints written by and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book When Computers Were Human written by David Alan Grier and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology. Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world. The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration. When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.

Download or read book The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty written by Sir William Petty and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The National Union Catalog Pre 1956 Imprints written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Time and Time Again written by Richard de Grijs and published by . This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Determination of one's longitude at sea has perplexed sailors for many centuries. The significant uptake of world trade in the 17th and 18th Centuries rendered the increasingly urgent need to solve the 'longitude problem' an issue of strategic national importance. Historical accounts of these efforts often focus almost exclusively on John Harrison's role in 18th Century Britain. This book starts instead from Galileo Galilei's late16th Century development of an accurate pendulum clock, which was first achieved in practice in the mid17th Century by Christiaan Huygens in the Dutch Republic. It is primarily based on collections of letters that have not been combined into a single volume before. Extensive introductory chapters on the history of mapmaking, the establishment of the world's reference meridian at Greenwich Observatory, and the rise of the scientific enterprise provide the appropriate context for nonexpert readers to fully engage with the book's main subject matter.

Download or read book Making up Numbers A History of Invention in Mathematics written by Ekkehard Kopp and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics offers a detailed but accessible account of a wide range of mathematical ideas. Starting with elementary concepts, it leads the reader towards aspects of current mathematical research. The book explains how conceptual hurdles in the development of numbers and number systems were overcome in the course of history, from Babylon to Classical Greece, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and so to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrative moves from the Pythagorean insistence on positive multiples to the gradual acceptance of negative numbers, irrationals and complex numbers as essential tools in quantitative analysis. Within this chronological framework, chapters are organised thematically, covering a variety of topics and contexts: writing and solving equations, geometric construction, coordinates and complex numbers, perceptions of ‘infinity’ and its permissible uses in mathematics, number systems, and evolving views of the role of axioms. Through this approach, the author demonstrates that changes in our understanding of numbers have often relied on the breaking of long-held conventions to make way for new inventions at once providing greater clarity and widening mathematical horizons. Viewed from this historical perspective, mathematical abstraction emerges as neither mysterious nor immutable, but as a contingent, developing human activity. Making up Numbers will be of great interest to undergraduate and A-level students of mathematics, as well as secondary school teachers of the subject. In virtue of its detailed treatment of mathematical ideas, it will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more about the development of the subject.

Download or read book Annuities Upon Lives Or The Valuation of Annuities Upon Any Number of Lives as Also of Reversions written by Abraham de Moivre and published by . This book was released on 1725 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics written by Nicolas Bacaër and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Eugene Wigner stressed, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in the physical sciences and their technological applications. The role of mathematics in the biological, medical and social sciences has been much more modest but has recently grown thanks to the simulation capacity offered by modern computers. This book traces the history of population dynamics---a theoretical subject closely connected to genetics, ecology, epidemiology and demography---where mathematics has brought significant insights. It presents an overview of the genesis of several important themes: exponential growth, from Euler and Malthus to the Chinese one-child policy; the development of stochastic models, from Mendel's laws and the question of extinction of family names to percolation theory for the spread of epidemics, and chaotic populations, where determinism and randomness intertwine. The reader of this book will see, from a different perspective, the problems that scientists face when governments ask for reliable predictions to help control epidemics (AIDS, SARS, swine flu), manage renewable resources (fishing quotas, spread of genetically modified organisms) or anticipate demographic evolutions such as aging.

Download or read book Darwin and Henslow written by Charles Darwin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Searching the Heavens and the Earth written by Agustin UDIAS and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesuits established a large number of astronomical, geophysical and meteorological observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries and again during the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world. The history of these observatories has never been published in a complete form. Many early European astronomical observatories were established in Jesuit colleges. During the 17th and 18th centuries Jesuits were the first western scientists to enter into contact with China and India. It was through them that western astronomy was first introduced in these countries. They made early astronomical observations in India and China and they directed for 150 years the Imperial Observatory of Beijing. In the 19th and 20th centuries a new set of observatories were established. Besides astronomy these now included meteorology and geophysics. Jesuits established some of the earliest observatories in Africa, South America and the Far East. Jesuit observatories constitute an often forgotten chapter of the history of these sciences.

Download or read book Lectures and Collections written by Robert Hooke and published by . This book was released on 1678 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bethlehem Revisited written by Floyd I. Brewer and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Imprint Catalog in the Rare Book Division written by New York Public Library. Rare Book Division and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The History of the London Water Industry 1580 1820 written by Leslie Tomory and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did pre-industrial London build the biggest water supply industry on earth? Beginning in 1580, a number of competing London companies sold water directly to consumers through a large network of wooden mains in the expanding metropolis. This new water industry flourished throughout the 1600s, eventually expanding to serve tens of thousands of homes. By the late eighteenth century, more than 80 percent of the city’s houses had water connections—making London the best-served metropolis in the world while demonstrating that it was legally, commercially, and technologically possible to run an infrastructure network within the largest city on earth. In this richly detailed book, historian Leslie Tomory shows how new technologies imported from the Continent, including waterwheel-driven piston pumps, spurred the rapid growth of London’s water industry. The business was further sustained by an explosion in consumer demand, particularly in the city’s wealthy West End. Meanwhile, several key local innovations reshaped the industry by enlarging the size of the supply network. By 1800, the success of London’s water industry made it a model for other cities in Europe and beyond as they began to build their own water networks. The city’s water infrastructure even inspired builders of other large-scale urban projects, including gas and sewage supply networks. The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820 explores the technological, cultural, and mercantile factors that created and sustained this remarkable industry. Tomory examines how the joint-stock form became popular with water companies, providing a stable legal structure that allowed for expansion. He also explains how the roots of the London water industry’s divergence from the Continent and even from other British cities was rooted both in the size of London as a market and in the late seventeenth-century consumer revolution. This fascinating and unique study of essential utilities in the early modern period will interest business historians and historians of science and technology alike.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Pestilence Pandemics and Plagues 2 volumes written by Joseph P. Byrne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 917 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Editor Joseph P. Byrne, together with an advisory board of specialists and over 100 scholars, research scientists, and medical practitioners from 13 countries, has produced a uniquely interdisciplinary treatment of the ways in which diseases pestilence, and plagues have affected human life. From the Athenian flu pandemic to the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical, and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover individual diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS); major epidemics (such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19); environmental factors (such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war); and historical and cultural effects of disease (such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theaters during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform). Primary source sidebars, over 70 illustrations, a glossary, and an extensive print and nonprint bibliography round out the work.