Beyond the Learned Academy: The Practice of Mathematics, 1600-1850

The tremendous growth of the mathematical sciences in the early modern world was reflected contemporaneously in an increasingly sophisticated level of practical mathematics in fields such as merchants' accounts, instrument making, teaching, navigation, and gauging. In many ways, mathematics shaped the knowledge culture of the age, infiltrating workshops, dockyards, and warehouses, before extending through the factories of the Industrial Revolution to the trading companies and banks of the nineteenth century.

While theoretical developments in the history of mathematics have been made the topic of numerous scholarly investigations, in many cases based around the work of key figures such as Descartes, Huygens, Leibniz, or Newton, practical mathematics, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, has been largely neglected.

The present volume, comprising fifteen essays by leading authorities in the history of mathematics, seeks to fill this gap by exemplifying the richness, diversity, and breadth of mathematical practice from the seventeenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Philip Beeley, Research Fellow and Tutor, Faculty of History and Linacre College, University of Oxford, Christopher Hollings, Departmental Lecturer in Mathematics and its History; Clifford Norton Senior Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics, The Queen's College, University of Oxford

Philip Beeley studied philosophy, mathematics, and history of exact sciences and technology at the University College of North Wales, and at the Technische Universität in Berlin, gaining his PhD in 1993. He held posts at the University of Hamburg and University of Münster before coming to Oxford in 2007. He is the former President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and is a member of the International Academy of the History of Science.


Christopher Hollings studied mathematics at the University of York, gaining his PhD in 2007. He has held post-doctoral positions in mathematics at the universities of Lisbon and Manchester, before moving to Oxford in 2010 as a researcher in the history of mathematics.