"The emergency which has arrived: the problematic history of nineteenth-century British algebra – a programmatic outline"

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Abstract

More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analytical by Newton, and enriched by Leibniz with a powerful and comprehensive notation’, wrote the young John Herschel and Charles Babbage of the calculus in 1813, ‘as if the soil of this country [was] unfavourable to its cultivation, it soon drooped and almost faded into neglect; and we now have to re-import the exotic, with nearly a century of foreign improvement, and to render it once more indigenous among us’.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)247-276
Number of pages30
JournalBritish Journal for the History of Science
Volume27
Issue number3
StatePublished - 1994

Keywords

  • Algebra
  • Symbolism
  • Abstract algebra
  • Calculus
  • Treatises
  • Philology
  • Lagrangian function
  • Physics
  • Arithmetic
  • History of science and technology
  • Mathematical sciences and techniques
  • History
  • 19th century

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