Mechanical World:: Descartes and Newton

Mechanical World:
DESCARTES AND
NEWTON
The
Dawn
of
Modern
Mathematics:
The Seventeenth Century
Spread of Knowledge
The
Renaissance,
which
by
the
sixteenth century was well under way in
Italy, soon spread north and west, first to
Germany, then to France and the Low
Countries, and finally to England. By the
late 1600s, scientific, technological, and
economic leadership centered on the
English Channelin those countries that
had been galvanized by the commerce
arising from the great voyages of
discovery.
At the start, the revival was mainly

literary, but gradually scholars began to pay
less attention to what was written in ancient
books and to place more reliance on their
own observations.
Seventeenth-century science may be said
to have begun with the appearance of
William Gilberts De Magnete in 1600, the
first treatise on physical science whose
content
was
based
entirely
on
experimentation; and the culmination
would have been Isaac Newtons Opticks
in 1704.
In between the DeMagnete and the

Opticks came the contributions of
Johannes Kepler, who was convinced
that planetary bodies moved not in
Aristotles ideal circles but in
elliptical orbits, and he thereby
formulated the laws of terrestrial
motion (1619).
Also there were the demonstrations

by William Harvey (1628) of the
circulatory route of the blood from
the heart through arteries and veins
by way of the lungs; the laying down
of the principles of modern chemistry
by Robert Boyle in his Sceptical
Chymist (1661); and the publication
of Robert Hookes Micrographia
(1665), the earliest large-scale work
on the microscopic observation of
cellular structure.
Whereas the Renaissance marked a

return to classical concepts, the
seventeenth century set mathematics
on entirely new foundations. So
extensive and radical were the changes
that historians have come to regard the
half-century from 1637 to 1687 as the
fountainhead of modern mathematics
the first date alluding to the publication
of Descartes La Geometrie and the
second to the date of publication of
Newtons Principia Mathematica.
Renaissance mathematics had added

little to the geometry of the ancient
Greeks, but 1600 ushered in an
unexpected revival in the subject. In
1637
the
French
mathematical
community witnessed one of those
strange coincidences, once thought
rare but which the history of science
has shown to be frequent. Two men,
Pierre de Fermat and Rene Descartes,
simultaneously wedded algebra to
geometry, to produce a remarkable
innovation, analytic geometry.
About the time when Fermat and

Descartes were laying the foundations of a
coordinate geometry, two other equally
original
mathematicians,
Pascal
and
Desargues, were rendering a similar
service in the area of synthetic projective
geometry. But it was not only on account of
the far-reaching developments in geometry
that the seventeenth century has become
illustrious in the history of mathematics, for
the activities of the mathematicians of the
period stretched into many fields, new and
old.
Number mysticism gave way to

number
theory,
in
Fermats
reflections on diophantine analysis.
The
mathematical
theory
of
probability, a subject to which
Cardan contributed in his book Liber
de Ludo Aleae, took its first full steps
in an exchange of letters between
Pascal and Fermat concerning the
calculation of probabilities.
Leibnizs attempt to reduce logical

discussion to systematic form was the
forerunner of modern symbolic logic;
but it was so far in advance of its
time that not until 200 years later
was the idea realized through the
work of the English mathematician
George Boole. Hardly less important
were
the
studies
of
Galileo,
Descartes, Torricelli, and Newton,
which were to turn mechanics into an
exact science during the next two
centuries.
During the middle years of the

Renaissance,
trigonometry
had
become a systematic branch of
mathematics in its own right in
place of serving as handmaiden to
astronomy. The aim of facilitating
work
with
complicated
trigonometric
tables
was
responsible for one of the greatest
computational improvements in
arithmetic,
the
invention
of
logarithms, by John Napier (1550
Napier worked at least twenty years

on the theory, which he explained in his
book Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis
Descriptio
(A
Description
of
an
Admirable Table of Logarithms, 1614).
Seldom has a new discovery won such
universal acclaim and acceptance. With
logarithms,
the
operations
of
multiplication and division can be
reduced to addition and subtraction,
thereby saving an immense amount of
calculation, especially when large
numbers are involved.
Astronomy was notorious for the timeconsuming computations it imposed; the

French mathematician Pierre de Laplace was
later to assert that the invention of
logarithms by shortening the labors,
doubled the life of the astronomer.
Above all, for mathematics the seventeenth
century was the century of the rise of
calculus. Although we normally ascribe the
invention of calculus to two brilliant
contemporaries, Isaac Newton (16421727)
and Gottfried Leibniz (16461716), great
advances in mathematics are seldom the
work of single individuals.
Cavalieri, Torricelli, Barrow, Descartes,

Fermat, and Wallis had all paved the way to
the threshold but had hesitated when it
came to crossing it. By the second half of
the seventeenth century, the raw materials
lay at hand out of which the calculus would
emerge. All that remained was for a Leibniz
or a Newton to fuse these ideas in a
tremendous synthesis. Newtons wellknown statement to Hooke, If I have seen
farther than others, it is because I have
stood on the shoulders of giants, shows
his appreciation of this cumulative and
progressive growth of mathematics.
The Two Great

Mathematician
in this Period:
Rene Descar
tes
Isaac Newto
n
The
End
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Mechanical World:

At the start, the revival was mainly

In between the DeMagnete and the

Also there were the demonstrations

Whereas the Renaissance marked a

Renaissance mathematics had added

About the time when Fermat and

Number mysticism gave way to

Leibnizs attempt to reduce logical

During the middle years of the

Napier worked at least twenty years

Astronomy was notorious for the timeconsuming computations it imposed; the

Cavalieri, Torricelli, Barrow, Descartes,

The Two Great

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