I am reading a book that should be of interest to many listmembers and
has significant connections to the thread of ways of constructing
mathematical proofs.
It's about the plurality of mathematical methods used in Newton's
Principia and how they were interpreted and understood by his
contemporaries and those immediately after him. The book traces
reactions and discussions from the publication of *Principia* (1687) to
the publication of Euler's *Mechanica* (1736), after which the author
considers Newton's geometrical methods of presentation "past and
obsolete", fully replaced by analytical representations of Newton's
results.
The author is Niccolo Guicciardini; the book's title is *Reading the
Principia"; the publisher is Cambridge University Press.
Regards,
Dana Densmore
mailto:densmore@greenlion.com
http://www.greenlion.com