Month: January 2015
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The Rolduc Conference: A Postmortem
The fifth edition of the History of Science PhD-conference in Rolduc showed that projects currently carried out under the banner ‘history of science’ are remarkably diverse in character. Chronologically, participants covered the period between the Carolingian Renaissance (eight century) to the present, while subjects of research ranged from the work of Christiaan Huygens to the…
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Blackwell’s rag-bag, or the (in)fertility of hybrid texts. Intertextual patterns and methodological shifts in an 1847 re-re-re-re-edition of the Prose Edda
Historians of scholarship should love hybrid works. By ‘hybrid works’ I mean works that don’t fit neatly into a specific genre or format, but that combine the characteristics of different genres and information from disparate kinds of source material, often even texts from different authors. Historians should love such hybrid works for three reasons. First,…
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Visualization of dimensionality after the institutional separation of mathematics and physics
Dimensionality is one of those concepts which has reached a higher level of complexity after the emergence of mathematics as an institutional discipline. Until the institutional split dimensionality was perceived as it had been understood from Euclid’s time. Visualizing dimensionality from that point of view was not particularly challenging. This changed with the introduction of…