Abstract

As mathematicians (as distinct from those who taught classical Greek geometry, who usually were part of the philosophy teaching at Renaissance universities) were able to extend their Archimidean and practical geometry to more and more engineering, there ambitions were bolstered by an argument amongst natural philosophers that mathematics was the supreme empirical science. In the last decades of the 16th century and the first decade of the 17th century the distinctions between what we would call mathematics, physics, and engineering were becoming more blurred – which left ample room for new ideas to seep through the interstices. Enter Galileo. (2/8)