Mathematical Works Printed in the Americas, 1554–1700


Book Description

"Burdick's exhaustive research has unearthed numerous examples of books not previously cataloged as mathematical. While it was thought that no mathematical writings in English were printed in the Americas before 1703, Burdick gives scholars one of their first chances to discover Jacob Taylor's 1697 Tenebrae, a treatise on solving triangles and other figures using basic trigonometry. He also goes beyond the English language to discuss works in Spanish and Latin, such as Alonso de la Vera Cruz's 1554 logic text, the Recognitio Summularum; a book on astrology by Enrico Martinez; books on the nature of comets by Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora and Eusebio Francisco Kino; and a 1676 almanac by Feliciana Ruiz, the first woman to produce a mathematical work in the Americas.".




Handbook on the History of Mathematics Education


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive International Handbook on the History of Mathematics Education, covering a wide spectrum of epochs and civilizations, countries and cultures. Until now, much of the research into the rich and varied history of mathematics education has remained inaccessible to the vast majority of scholars, not least because it has been written in the language, and for readers, of an individual country. And yet a historical overview, however brief, has become an indispensable element of nearly every dissertation and scholarly article. This handbook provides, for the first time, a comprehensive and systematic aid for researchers around the world in finding the information they need about historical developments in mathematics education, not only in their own countries, but globally as well. Although written primarily for mathematics educators, this handbook will also be of interest to researchers of the history of education in general, as well as specialists in cultural and even social history.




A Colonial Book Market


Book Description

Tracing the variety of printed commodities that were circulating in the urban sphere, Agnes Gehbald provides a comprehensive study of print culture in Peru in the decades before Independence. An important volume for those interested in the history of books beyond the European market.




Choice


Book Description




Quick(er) Calculations


Book Description

Finalist of the 2022 PROSE Awards How fast can you calculate? Would you like to be faster? This book presents the time honored tricks and tips of calculation, from a fresh perspective, to boost the speed at which you can add -- whether a couple of numbers, or columns so long an accountant may faint. Find out how to subtract, multiply, divide, and find square roots more quickly. What's more, this book gives suggestions for how to find answers that are good enough for tricky tasks like dividing by 17. It includes brand new ways to multiply and divide irrational numbers such as pi, e, the square root of 2, and the golden ratio. It has sections devoted to ancient mathematics, and the techniques we can borrow from previous and other cultures, in order to calculate more quickly. Examples, some serious, some fun, come from everyday life or from history -- like hot dog eating competitions, the Vatican's cricket team, the molecular weight of the molecule with the world's longest name, and the amount of people taken by Henry VIII to arguably history's biggest party, the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In an age of timed multiple-choice questions, the swifter you can sum, or rule out wrong answers, the better you will do. If you love to play with numbers, this book will be recreational reading. And if you ever wonder whether simple arithmetic problems can crop up in everyday life, this book provides a fresh perspective.




Mining Language


Book Description

Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.




Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain


Book Description

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain features essays by leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and the history of science, exploring the relationship between technical innovations and theatrical events that incorporated scientific content into dramatic productions. Focusing on Spanish dramas between 1500 and 1700, through the birth and development of its playhouses and coliseums and the phenomenal success of its major writers, this collection addresses a unique phenomenon through the most popular, versatile, and generous medium of the time. The contributors tackle subjects and disciplines as diverse as alchemy, optics, astronomy, acoustics, geometry, mechanics, and mathematics to reveal how theatre could be used to deploy scientific knowledge. While Science on Stage contributes to cultural and performance studies it also engages with issues of censorship, the effect of the Spanish Inquisition on the circulation of ideas, and the influence of the Eastern traditions in Spain.







Library Journal


Book Description




Genre and Globalization


Book Description

Die zunehmende globale Zirkulation und Verflechtung literarischer Praktiken verlangt nach einer Revidierung nationaler und kontinentaler Gattungsgeschichten. Dieser Band lenkt den Blick aus einer transarealen Perspektive heraus auf die wachsende Diversität von Gattungen im Zuge der kulturellen Globalisierung. Er interessiert sich weniger für die zunehmende Homogenisierung von Gattungssystemen und Lesererwartungen infolge globalisierter Kommunikationsstrukturen als vielmehr für eine neue Heterogenität literarischer Formen, die aus Prozessen der Hybridisierung, Transkulturation, Kreolisierung und des Kulturtransfers hervorgeht. Anhand von Fallstudien zu Lateinamerika, der Karibik, Westafrika und den USA von der Kolonialzeit bis zur Gegenwart befassen sich die Beiträge mit unterschiedlichen Szenarien der globalen Zirkulation literarischer Formen, kombiniert mit theoretischen Überlegungen zum Zusammenhang von kultureller Globalisierung und Gattungsgeschichte. The increasingly globalized circulation and interdependence of literary practices calls for a revision of the history of national and continental genres. This volume focuses attention from a transareal perspective on the growing diversity of genres in the move towards cultural globalization. It is less interested in the increasing homogenization of genres and of reader expectations resulting from globalized structures of communication, but rather in a new heterogeneity of literary forms which arises from the processes of hybridization, transculturation, creolization and cultural transfer. On the basis of case studies on Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa and the USA from the colonial period to the present day, the contributions examine different scenarios of the global circulation of literary forms, combined with theoretical reflections on the connections between cultural globalization and the history of genres.