55 min listen
Davide Crippa, The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century" (Birkhäuser, 2019)
Davide Crippa, The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century" (Birkhäuser, 2019)
ratings:
Length:
61 minutes
Released:
Aug 28, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
From 1667 to 1676, a pivotal controversy played out among several mathematical luminaries of the time, partly in the proceedings of the Royal Society but partly in private correspondence. The controversy concerned whether an infamous problem of Ancient Greek geometry, the quadrature of the central conic sections (better known as squaring the circle), could be solved using the classical tools of straightedge and compass. While its impossibility would not be rigorously proven for two more centuries, the theoretical and philosophical implications of these attempts to settle the issue were constitutive of the contemporaneous development of calculus. Dr. Davide Crippa's book The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century (Birkhäuser, 2019) is a deep dive into this little-covered episode in the modern European history of mathematics. He examines the advances of Gregory and Leibniz in full mathematical detail, clarifying in current notation and elegant figures the steps and missteps of their constructions and arguments, and in some cases through the lens of critical and often fierce exchanges with their peers, including recently-published correspondence that traces the former's influence on the latter's efforts. The book reveals The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century to have been a sensation of its time, and deserving of a treatment of its own.
Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn Health.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn Health.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Aug 28, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012): Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, by New Books in the History of Science