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From the Renaissance to the Birth of Calculus

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A Brief History of Mathematics

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During the period when the ancient civilizations of China, India, and Arabia in the east were making new contributions in mathematics, Europe was in the midst of its long Dark Age, a term first used by the Italian poet and scholar Petrarch (1304–1374), often considered the father of the Renaissance.

I would wish that the painter could be as learned as possible in the liberal arts, but first and foremost I would wish that he know geometry.

Leon Battista Alberti

Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea…

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Copernicus was studying at the University of Kraków, a medium-sized city in Poland that was home to the two Nobel Laureates Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska at the same time in the early twenty-first century, at the time when Columbus reached the New World.

  2. 2.

    On Painting, Tr. Rocco Sinisgalli

  3. 3.

    At that time, Latin was the universal language of academia, and Newton composed his major works in Latin.

  4. 4.

    Historically, the Archbishops of Mainz were the most important of the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor; it was also in Mainz that Gutenberg invented his movable type printing press.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Tianxin Cai

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  1. Tianxin Cai
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Cai, T. (2023). From the Renaissance to the Birth of Calculus. In: A Brief History of Mathematics. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26841-0_5

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