[HM] p. s. on Maclaurin
Judith Grabiner (jgrabine@calvin.pitzer.edu)
Sun, 29 Nov 1998 20:51:30 -0800 (PST)
The following paragraph was unfortunately deleted from the message I just
sent:
The second volume of Maclaurin's 2-volume Treatise of Fluxions
is NOT geometric, but analytic. Maclaurin's mastery of geometry
certainly led him to some of his achievements (Lagrange praised
Maclaurin's work on the shape of the earth, done using
an amazing knowledge of the classical geometry of the ellipse
and therefore of spheroids, as the equal of the work of
Archimedes, in his own work on the topic in 1773, reprinted
in Lagrange's Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 619ff). Nonetheless, Maclaurin
also could wield analytical tools with the best of them, as
many places in the second volume of the Treatise show (e.g.
pages 672-5, 694-6, 652ff).