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š„³Publication day for #UndergroundMathematics! Thanks to everyone involvedā¤ļø
Hereās a shortš§µto its main argument: How did practical mathematics and a culture of accuracy developed in EM Europe? Rationality wasnāt just about scholars, it included craftsmen and artisans too!
Hereās a shortš§µto its main argument: How did practical mathematics and a culture of accuracy developed in EM Europe? Rationality wasnāt just about scholars, it included craftsmen and artisans too!
Practical mathematics was ubiquitous, from wine gauging to mercantile arithmetic. It was widely depicted, as here in āThe Measurersā (see Jim Bennettās great piece on this painting @HSMOxford). And yet, usual narratives have forgotten a whole discipline: subterranean geometry!
The Geometria Subterranea was also known as Markscheidekunst or āthe art of setting limitsā. These surveyors were working underground in the silver mines of the Empire, in Scandinavia and Spain, but who knows what their mathematics was? Or how it was taught and improved?
Today a š§µon mining maps, how to look at them, and what they tell us about how people perceived the underground world! With bits of map history, paper history, and obviously lots of #UndergroundMathematics. For the untrained eye, these maps are difficult to understand... #HistSTM
These maps are in fact a recent development, mostly in the 17th century. An old minerās proverb said that āno one can see through stoneā, and in fact it used to be a huge problem: how to see limits of concessions, to locate water wheels and ore vein?
In the 15th c. there was virtually no room for maps. Extraction was monitored directly, by visitations from mining masters and jurors, as their āAugenscheinā (visual inspection) was decisive. Things began to change bc rulers wanted to monitor their underground riches at distance
