Month: November 2015
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Paper Machines: the systems, maps, chronometers, and apparatuses of Johann Christoph Gatterer
Johann Christoph Gatterer was a data gatherer. As a professor of history in Göttingen, from 1759 until his death forty years later, he compiled collections of medieval manuscripts, coins, heraldic tables, maps, and even weather reports. He did not only collect them: he also transformed his hoard into manuals for studying heraldry and medieval charters,…
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Konnektivität und Verbindlichkeit: An interview with Jürgen Renn
While still working maniacally on my thesis about the reception of Ernst Cassirer’s work on the history of physics, I let the U3 once again drive me to the green and wealthy Dahlem. This time it was for an interview with Jürgen Renn, Director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG). It would be our third…
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Famous, Shrewd, Florentine, Mathematician: Guess Who?
In 1611 an unknown novice recited a poem titled “Sonnet on the Death of the King Henry the Great, and on the Discovery of Some New Planets, or Stars Wandering Around Jupiter, Made this Year by Galileo Galilei, Famous Mathematician of the Grand Duke of Florence”.[1] The occasion was the three-day commemoration of the death…