User:Thony C.

Hi I'm new around here and will set this page up properly some time in the next two weeksThony C. 12:12, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Who I am, what I am, why I am
I am Thony Christie an aging English freak who has been living in Franconia for 27 years.

I am a narrative historian of science who became addicted to the history of mathematics at the age of sixteen upon reading Eric Temple Bell's Men of Mathematics, a terrible book but very inspiring. Since then my interest has expanded to the history of the natural and formal sciences and technology from their beginnings up till the present. This is of course an impossibly wide field, my special areas of interest are:


 * History of mathematics
 * History of computing
 * History of formal logic
 * History of astronomy
 * History of astrology
 * History of early scientific printing
 * History of cartography
 * History of optics
 * History of navigation

Most of these with special emphasis on the period 1400 - 1700

In recent years I have become a local historian of science, which as I live within spiting distance of Nuremberg means mostly the mathematical sciences in the Renaissance i.e.astrology, astronomy, cartography, and so forth...and especially early scientific printing. However I live even closer to Erlangen, where I attended university (for the second time!) and so I also have more than a passing interest in the Erlangen Program, Georg Simon Ohm and Emmy Noether. Just up the road is Bamberg the source of another major interest Christopher Clavius and the Calendar Reform.

Beyond this I have spent an incredibly amount of time in my life studying the lives and work of Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler, of the two I prefer Kepler.

I am a passionate opponent of what I call the mythology of science which is what most people believe to be the history of science! Most of what most people believe to be true in the history of science is in fact wrong but despite the best efforts of the historians of science in the last fifty plus years people stubbornly go on believing the myths.This is a theme on which I tend to shout my mouth off, ragesoss caught me doing just that over at Science Blogs and invited me to come here instead and so that is why I am here.

My aims
My aims are to improve, edit, rewrite or create the articles on:


 * History of science in the Renaissance
 * Johannes Petreius
 * Regiomontanus
 * Early scientific publishing
 * Christopher Clavius
 * Johannes Werner
 * Albrecht Dürer as mathematician

and so on and so forth but also to stick my nose in where ever and wheneverThony C. 16:49, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

My Sandbox
Here