Symbols and things : material mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Kevin Lambert.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lambert, Kevin, author.

Series:

Science and culture in the nineteenth century.

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communication in mathematics--History--19th century.

Communication in mathematics.

Mathematics--Equipment and supplies--History--19th century.

Mathematics.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (329 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2021]

Summary:

In the steam-powered mechanical age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians depended on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Though not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book--from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton--relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues. The letters they exchanged, together with the equations, diagrams, tables, or pictures that filled their manuscripts and publications, were all tangible traces of abstract ideas that extended mathematicians into their social and material environment. Each chapter of this book explores a thing, or assembling of things, mathematicians needed to do their work--whether a textbook, museum, journal, library, diagram, notebook, or letter--all characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century British taskscape, but also representative of great change to a discipline brought about by an industrialized world in motion.

Contents:

Textbook in the marketplace

Fences, diaries, and mathematical journals

Cambridge Museological Science and the making of English algebra

The mathematician's library: George Green George Boole, and Augustus De Morgan

Romantic space and imaginary numbers: imagining space through diagrams

William Thomson's notebooks

Kites and letter: the Peter Guthrie Tait and William Rowan Hamilton correspondence.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822946830

0822946831

OCLC:

1315738371