<<Ovid has never been an obscure author, and in the past both classics and
geometry were much more widely taught than now. I therefore suspect that the
originator of the flat-earth calumny may have been deliberately trying to
mislead.>>
Insofar as that originator can be determined, he was a fiction writer like
Ovid, Washington Irving, among the earliest in the literary canon of the USA.
My country has often been guilty of aggressive philistinism; but Irving did
indeed have a target -- medieval obscurantism, associated in the early
19th-century American (protestant) mind with Spain and Catholicism.
It would be fun to have Irving around to point out to him that the
"obscurantist" universitarians of Spain who debated and rejected the
geography of Columbus's project not only assumed the earth was spherical,
they were disturbed about Columbus's use of Pierre D'Ailly's 14th-century
estimate of the sphere's circumference. They said it was much too small,
that the old figure of about 24,000 miles was better-founded -- and of course
they were quite right.
More to the point here on [HM], philistinism comes in many forms and to me, a
longtime teacher, the hardest to combat is "I haven't time to learn that
'other stuff'; it isn't 'interesting'." Most students must learn mathematics
in passing rather than in order to become mathematicians, and some of those
who learn it in passing, learn it in ways that mathematical professionals
would not dream of using but which such students find both more congenial and
more efficient. Some really do find their royal road to the ontogeny (so to
speak) of mathematics by way of its phylogeny -- its history. My advice
would be to give such people their space. It has been said that mathematics
is a human endeavor. Isaiah Berlin seconded Vico in numbering it among the
humanities. If so, must not story be as much a part of mathematics as logic
is? Our responsibility as historians is to get the stories right -- or at
least to get them as right as we can get them given the state of the evidence.
And as to mathematicians' "contempt" for history, I have found little of it
in my own reading and am fascinated by the examples given in this thread.
Thanks.
-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn