Infinitesimal
How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World
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- €6.99
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
On August 10, 1632, five leading Jesuits convened in a sombre Roman palazzo to pass judgment on a simple idea: that a continuous line is composed of distinct and limitlessly tiny parts. The doctrine would become the foundation of calculus, but on that fateful day the judges ruled that it was forbidden. With the stroke of a pen they set off a war for the soul of the modern world.
Amir Alexander takes us from the bloody religious strife of the sixteenth century to the battlefields of the English civil war and the fierce confrontations between leading thinkers like Galileo and Hobbes. The legitimacy of popes and kings, as well as our modern beliefs in human liberty and progressive science, hung in the balance; the answer hinged on the infinitesimal.
Pulsing with drama and excitement, Infinitesimal will forever change the way you look at a simple line.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
UCLA historian and mathematician Alexander (Geometrical Landscapes) gives readers insight into a real-world Da Vinci Code like intrigue with this look at the history of a simple, yet pivotal, mathematical concept. According to classic geometry, a line is made of a string of points, or "indivisibles," which cannot be broken down into anything smaller. But if that's so, how many indivisibles are in a line, and how big are they? And what happens when you divide the line into smaller segments? It seemed that indivisibles weren't really indivisible at all, a "deeply troubling" idea to the medieval Church and its adherents, who demanded a rigidly unchanging cosmos with no surprises. Churchmen and respected thinkers like Descartes railed against infinitesimals, while Galileo, Newton, and others insisted the concept defined the real world. The argument became an intellectual and philosophical battleground, in a Church already threatened by doctrinal schisms and social upheaval. Focusing on the Jesuits, beginning with the German Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius, Alexander explores this war of ideas in the context of a world seething with political and social unrest. This in-depth history offers a unique view into the mathematical idea that became the foundation of our open, modern world.
