Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents V
3. Introduction 1
4. Revisiting Fermat: John Wallis and the English reception of number theory in the second half of the seventeenth century 11
5. Ideal chords in Poncelet’s work, from the Saratov notebooks to the Traité des propriétés projectives des figures 35
6. How Heinrich Hertz mapped the radiation field 65
7. Von Neumann and impossibility, from Gödel to EDVAC 75
8. Liouville’s Journal and the Journal de l’École Polytechnique: a brief comparison 101
9. Which groups, which forces transformed abbacus algebra, thus creating intellectual infrastructure for the scientific revolution? Reflections on the possibility to transfer the Zilsel thesis 123
10. Cognitive artifacts in the history of mathematics 153
11. Nicolas Rashevsky and Alfred Lotka: different modeling strategies in the beginning of mathematical biology in the early twentieth century 169
12. Geometrical themes from Greek antiquity: how they resonated in the nineteenth century 185
13. From heliocentrism to epicycles: a commentary on pre-Ptolemaic astronomy 207
14. What is history of mathematics to twenty-first century mathematicians? 235
15. Publications by Jesper Lützen 255
16. About the authors 261
17. About the editors 263