This paper proposes a fresh look at the 'Dissensions' that held up scientific business at the Royal Society during the spring of 1784. It focuses attention on the career and personal networks of Charles Hutton, whose dismissal from the role of Foreign Secretary ignited the row. It shows that the incident had no single cause but was the outcome of several factors that made Hutton intolerable to Joseph Banks, President of the Society, and of several factors that made Banks unpopular as President among a group of about 40 otherwise rather disparate Fellows.
This essay represents a first attempt to make sense of the mass of early modern English publications that deal with or refer to mathematics, using a bibliometric approach made possible by the new electronic databases: Early English books online and Eighteenth-century collections online. I present statistical information about references to mathematics in this corpus of books, perform some statistical analysis of the trends that the data show, comment on the methodological problems raised, and assess what these results do and do not tell us about early modern English discussion of mathematics.
Benjamin WardhaughSir Thomas Little Heath : readers of this volume will certainly know his name and will very probably have used his work. Most prominent among that work is Heath's English version of Euclid's Elements, which remains widely available both in print and online more than a century after its first publication. Dover Books has kept the text of the 1926 second edition in print in recent years (Euclid 1956(Euclid , most recently reprinted in 2000, while the Green Lion Press has recently issued an English Elements amounting to Heath's translation without his commentary (Euclid 2002). On the web, David Joyce's popular English hypertext of the Elements (Euclid 1996) adopts a translation which 'is similar to Heath's edition'. 1 In fact, over six decades Heath published English versions of several major Greek mathematical texts, as well as a monumental history of Greek mathematics:
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