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The Renaissance Mathematicus
Personal blog · thonyc.wordpress.comhistorymathscience
The Renaissance Mathematicus is a personal blog at thonyc.wordpress.com about history, math and science. Since 2011, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 112 times, most often “The Phlogiston Theory – Wonderfully wrong but fantastically fruitful”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Just another WordPress.com weblog
Most-linked posts?
- /2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-great-bluff-and-part-of-the-reason-why-kuhn-is-wrong/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-05-15
- The Phlogiston Theory – Wonderfully wrong but fantastically fruitful3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-10-26
- Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-13
- /2014/10/03/the-unfortunate-backlash-in-the-historiography-of-islamic-science/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-19
- The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-15
- The Great Man Paradox2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-11
- Mary Somerville, the woman who translated Laplace2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-20
- They knew it was round, damn it2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-25
- Galileo and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-02
- The path that the decimal number system took from India to medieval Europe2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-03
What Hacker News says?
Ah, sorry — that'll teach me to post when I should be asleep. The author of the blog has discussed it a few times. This is probable the best summary: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/the-true-story-of-a-... Here's another post, more about another book he recommends on the subject: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/retelling-a-story-th... The book is Richard Dunn & Rebekah Higgitt, Longitude: How Ships,…
Comment linking /2014/12/09/retelling-a-story-this-time-with-all-the-facts/
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?”Submitted Calculus for the Curious as a story · 243 points
HN discussionI also enjoyed Longitude when I read it, but it's been described as "suffer[ing] however from a major flaw, it is a distortion of the real history it is claiming to relate." https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/dava-sobel-tries-her...
Comment linking /2012/09/10/dava-sobel-tries-her-hand-at-historical-fantasy/
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?”Submitted They knew it was round, damn it as a story · 185 points
HN discussionBy far the best writing on this subject I have found is over at the fantastic Renaissance Mathematicus blog. Galileo, the Church and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-a... Galileo, Foscarini, The Catholic Church, and heliocentricity in 1615 Part 1 – the occurrences: A Rough Guide. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/galileo-foscarini-th... And part 2 https…
Comment linking /2012/08/16/acceptance-rejection-and-indifference-to-heliocentricity-before-1610/
on “Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious”Submitted The path that the decimal number system took from India to medieval Europe as a story · 173 points
HN discussionThe corpuscular theory of light was one of those theories that was wrong but useful. The successor wave theory was also wrong. It may turn out that general relativity is founded on incorrect reasoning ("God does not play dice" for one), but that matters much less than it being fantastically useful. The basic idea- if light interacts with gravity, if you pack enough mass into a region you will get a dark star- is cor…
Comment linking /2015/10/23/the-phlogiston-theory-wonderfully-wrong-but-fantastically-fruitful/
on “In 1783, an English rector predicted black holes using classical mechanics”Submitted History of Maths for Beginners as a story · 162 points
HN discussionThere was an article a couple days ago about why everyone believes Columbus proved the world was round[1], even though that isn't true[2]: The real myth of the medieval flat earth begins first in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has two principal sources. Probably the most influential of these was the American author Washington Irving who in his fictional biography of Columbus claimed that Columbus had to…
Comment linking /2016/05/25/repeat-after-me-they-knew-it-was-round-damn-it/
on “How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment”Submitted The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia as a story · 115 points
HN discussionIf you like this then https://thonyc.wordpress.com/ is the hard stuff.
Comment linking /
on “Connections by James Burke (1978)”Submitted Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones as a story · 103 points
HN discussionThe article is wrong on a couple of counts (for multiplication and division). Here is a more complete one: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/the-widespread-and-p... (Surfaced on HN with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13636277 )
Comment linking /2017/02/10/the-widespread-and-persistent-myth-that-it-is-easier-to-multiply-and-divide-with-hindu-arabic-numerals-than-with-roman-ones/
on “How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?”Submitted The Great Man Paradox as a story · 80 points
HN discussionDon't use the term "Dark Ages". The article does not. Use "early European medieval period". Repeating it perpetuates the myth. If you must use it, say "European Dark Ages", and be aware that you are still perpetrating a false anti-religion narrative. > if in the future scholars were dismissing Newton's novel contributions to astronomy because his physics model is not that accurate compared to Einstein's. Newton's ca…
Comment linking /2014/10/03/the-unfortunate-backlash-in-the-historiography-of-islamic-science/
on “Tides are weirder than you think”Submitted The Swinging 1660s as a story · 69 points
HN discussionDoes she like math puzzles? I came across this recently, about Mary Somerville. She's not exactly Ada Lovelace, but close. At the age of fifteen she came across a mathematical puzzle in a ladies magazine (mathematical recreation columns were quite common in ladies magazines in the 18th and 19th-centuries!) [1] http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/the-queen-of-science-...
Comment linking /2014/10/14/the-queen-of-science-the-woman-who-tamed-laplace/
on “When Women Stopped Coding”Submitted The first English professor of mathematics as a story · 66 points
HN discussionIf you would like to know more about her: Her legacy https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=6967 About her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether Where she lived and studied https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/the-house-where-emmy...
Comment linking /2011/05/07/the-house-where-emmy-lived/
on “Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics”Submitted A Lady Logician as a story · 66 points
HN discussionThe OP is right to raise questions about this in academics. The problem is that all sorts of things happens in academics: The grad student is first author and the professor is last author, and people see the credit that way. The grad student is first author and the professor is last, but people see the prof as the "real" first author. Look at citation formats and explain why the last author is kept on lengthy author…
Comment linking /2017/09/07/the-great-man-paradox/
on “Art technicians: The industry’s dirty secret, or all part of the process?”Submitted Mary Somerville, the woman who translated Laplace as a story · 66 points
HN discussionYeah, this was discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13636277 And division basically works the same. Discussed article is https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/the-widespread-and-p... Nowhere as complex as it's made out to be.
Comment linking /2017/02/10/the-widespread-and-persistent-myth-that-it-is-easier-to-multiply-and-divide-with-hindu-arabic-numerals-than-with-roman-ones/
on “How did anyone do math in Roman numerals? (2017)”Submitted The Phlogiston Theory – Wonderfully wrong but fantastically fruitful as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThanks for your enlightening comment. This seems to be a well-written article that goes more into depth: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-a...
Comment linking /2014/05/29/galileo-the-church-and-heliocentricity-a-rough-guide/
on “Researcher discovers another astronomy book written by Galileo Galilei”Submitted Killed by Homeopathy as a story · 63 points
HN discussionIn 1834 Somerville 'became the first person to be described in print as a 'scientist'.[ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/why-there-werent-any... ] (She also lived to be 91yo ... not so easy at the time!) Oxford named a college after her in 1879 - although women were not allowed to matriculate until 1920!
Comment linking /2016/09/07/why-there-werent-any-scientists-before-the-late-nineteenth-century/
on “Mary Somerville, for whom the word “scientist” was coined”Submitted James Watt: A Twelve-Year Flash of Genius as a story · 56 points
HN discussionThe author actually considers Galileo to have been a self-promoting second-rater (at best) who has been inordinately over-praised, and he is not at all happy that Galileo is presented as a sort of secular saint who stood up to the church, so part of his paradox is to include Newton and Einstein but exclude Galileo from the pantheon of the Great Scientists. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/extracting-the-stopp…
Comment linking /2010/06/02/extracting-the-stopper/
on “The Great Man Paradox”Submitted A seventeenth century Jesuit who constructed his own monument as a story · 51 points
HN discussion
