Description
CAMBRIDGE Before Newton The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow 2008 Edition by Mordechai Feingold
A comprehensive re-evaluation of Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), one of the more prominent and intriguing of all seventeenth-century men of science. Barrow is remembered today - if at all - only as Sir Isaac Newton's mentor and patron, but he in fact made important contributions to the disciplines of optics and geometry. Moreover, he was a prolific and influential preacher as well as a renowned classical scholar. By seeking to understand Barrow's mathematical work, primarily within the confines of the pre-Newtonian scientific framework, the book offers a substantial rethinking of his scientific acumen. In addition to providing a biographical study of Barrow, it explores the intimate connections among his scientific, philological and religious worldviews in an attempt to convey the complexity of the seventeenth-century culture that gave rise to Isaac Barrow, a breed of polymath that would become increasingly rare with the advent of modern science. Table of contents :- List of contributors; Editor's preface; 1. Isaac Barrow: divine, scholar, mathematician Mordechai Feingold; 2. The Optical Lectures and the foundations of the theory of optical imagery Alan E. Shapiro; 3. Barrow's mathematics: between ancients and moderns Michael S. Mahoney; 4. Isaac Barrow's academic milieu: Interregnum and Restoration Cambridge John Gascoigne; 5. Barrow as a scholar Anthony Grafton; 6. The preacher Irene Simon; 7. Isaac Barrow's library Mordechai Feingold; Index.