User talk:SteveMcCluskey/History of Mathematics

I read your article with interest.

It is much too long to be dropped into the current article History of Mathematics. This section cannot be longer than, for example, 18th Century mathematics. The structure of Wikipedia (unlike, say, the structure of Encyclopedia Britannica) depends strongly on pages that browsers load quickly, with hyperlinks to other pages. If you want this material in Wikipedia, and I think that a good idea, you would need to put it in as a new article, with a paragraph and a link in the History of Mathematics article.

The only other comment that comes to mind is that much of the material here is really history of science rather than history of math, and illustrates the common practice in the middle ages of taking an idea from one area (speed, resistance) and trying to apply it to another area (medicine, resistance to healing), assuming that the proportions that govern one area govern all.

I could suggest a few changes, line by line or word by word, but since I assume this is a draft, I'll leave it at the general comments above. Rick Norwood 13:17, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I've taken your advice and have condensed substantially, but I find your suggestion that the diversity of actors and topics in the millenium from 300 to 1400 can be covered in the same space as the 18th c., (which basically talks about the elaboration of the concept of number by Gauss and his predecessors), is totally unreasonable.


 * Much more suitable to the complexity of the mathematics of this period would be something on the order of the nineteenth century or Arabic Islamic sections. SteveMcCluskey 15:14, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Rick: A minor clarification; I didn't detail the relation between Bradwardine and Arnold of Vilanova much. Arnold's concept had nothing to do with "resistance to healing", he was using the concepts of hot and cold; Bradwardine was relating force and resistance.  They were both using the same mathematical model to analyze totally different physical problems.  Sounds kind of modern doesn't it :)     Steve -- 15:52, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Early Modern section
I've been struggling with the Early Modern section, but it doesn't seem very coherent. If, as Rick says, we're to focus on theoretical, rather than practical mathematics, the discussion of the Treviso Arithmetic seems totally inappropriate. The emphasais on mapping as a driving force for trigonometry misses the important role of astronomy and astronomers and from what I know, seems a bit anachronistic. Detailed application of trigonometry to mapping comes in in the eighteenth century with large scale mapping surveys concerned with the shape of the earth and the delineation of national boundaries.

Any help here would be welcome. --SteveMcCluskey 15:16, 5 April 2007 (UTC)