Matt Hodgkinson

It's often said that journal publishing is still using 17th-century technology, but I think that's unfair. After all, they didn't have DOIs in the 1600s.

#SciComm #JournalPublishing #HistoryOfScience

Archivist Liz

This blog has been a very long time in the making. Last summer I visited the Niels Bohr Library and Archives of the American Institute of Physics. That visit turned into an interview (Allison Rein interviewed me). Very excited to share this. I hope it will help a few more people find their way to our catalogue as well! aip.org/library/ex-libris-univ #arhives #digipres #historyofscience #physics #nuclearphysics

Inside the International Atomic Energy Agency Archives Unit

An Interview with Archivist, Elizabeth Kata

AIP
The Inquisitive Biologist

This week's #NewBooks at the library: I bought a second-hand copy of #JamesHutton: The Genius of Time from Birlinn Publishing and adopted a damaged copy of The Great Auk from Bloomsbury Sigma that I hope to review soon. Also very pleased to have found a second-hand copy of Peter Wellnhofer's classic The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of #Pterosaurs which was recommended by @markwitton for its section on the history of research (when Witton recommends, I listen).

#Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon #Geology #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Ornithology #Palaeontology #Paleontology @bookstodon

The Inquisitive Biologist

This week's #NewBooks at the library: Two academic books

- "Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain" from the University of Chicago Press; and
- "The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire" from Harvard University Press.

Completely unrelated, won at auction, a vintage artbook from #GamesWorkshop by John Blanche and one of my favourite illustrators, Ian Miller.

#HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Anthropology #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon

IHC

🆕 Congratulations to Quintino Lopes, whose paper about Armando de Lacerda and the Coimbra Phonetics Laboratory (co-authored with Francisco de Lacerda and Ana Simões) was the winner of the 2025 edition of the A. H. de Oliveira Marques Prize for Portuguese History! 🥳

👉 Full story: ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/quintino-lo

@histodons
@histodon

#Histodons #PortugueseHistory #HistoryOfScience #HistoryfTechnology #Phonetics #Awards #ASPSH #AcademicLife #HistóriaDePortugal #HistóriaDaCiência #HistóriaDaTecnologia

hightable notes

For most of history, the disciplines of science and philosophy are tightly connected, arguably even the same.

Alchemy was considered a science, and indeed people like Newton and Bacon dabbled in it. Facts and theories as we now know them are much different, and bordered on philosophical arguments. Experimentation wasn't a standard procedure, and a community of scientific professionals hardly existed.

#history #histodons #quote #bookstodon #historyOfScience

1/4

IHC

⏱️ 90 segundos para a Ângela Salgueiro nos contar o que anda a fazer no projecto #PHONLAB, dedicado à História da fonética experimental em Portugal, nomeadamente ao Laboratório de Fonética Experimental instalado na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, em 1936, por Armando de Lacerda.

🎧 90segundosdeciencia.pt/episode

#Histodons #HistoryInThePublicSphere #SciComm #SciComPT #HistóriaNaEsferaPública #FonéticaExprimental #ExperimentalPhonetics #HistoryOfScience #HistóriaDaCiência #Coimbra

IHC

📖 In an paper published in History of Science, Inês Gomes and Frederico Ágoas examine ‘the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, specifically the impact of forestry science and fire management on land use and community dynamics in rural Portuguese mountains’.

An output of the #FIREUSES project!

👉 doi.org/10.1177/00732753241304

@histodons
@envhist

#Histodons #HistoryOfScience #EnvironmentalHistory #FireManagement #LandUse #Wildfires #HistóriaAmbiental #HistóriaDaCiência

Markus Redeker

I am currently reading Euler's “Introductio in analysin infinitorum” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduc). The Wikipedia article calls it “the first precalculus book” — which is true in a strict sense, since there are no integrals or derivatives in it, but the book contains so much material about infinite series and products that it cannot be called precalculus in the modern sense.
The text looks quite modern (since all later authors followed Euler's style) but a lot of notations that today we take for granted are still missing, especially sum and product sign and even indices. How does he then manage to write about infinite series?
A generic power series takes for Euler the form

𝐴 + 𝐵𝑥 + 𝐶𝑥𝑥 + 𝐷𝑥³ + 𝐸𝑥⁴ &ct.,

and he also speaks of the series of coefficients, 𝐴, 𝐵, 𝐶, 𝐷, 𝐸 &ct., even if he apparently has no concept of a series as a mathematical object in its own right.
For more complex manipulations of series, Euler use the concept of the general term of a series (so that the general term of the geometric series is 𝑥ⁿ), and with this concept one can do almost the same calculations as with a sum operator.
And what is if there is more than one infinite series? A second series is for Euler often

𝑎 + 𝑏𝑥 + 𝑐𝑥𝑥 + 𝑑𝑥³ + 𝑒𝑥⁴ &ct.

and a third and fourth series may have the coefficients 𝑎', 𝑏', 𝑐', 𝑑', 𝑒' &ct. and 𝑎'', 𝑏'', 𝑐'', 𝑑'', 𝑒'' &ct. This way he produces a lot of mathematics.

And in one place (§214), when he has used up all other methods to create new types of coefficients, he even distinguishes between a series with coefficients in italics and one with coefficients in straight letters:

A + B𝑥 + C𝑥𝑥 + D𝑥³ + E𝑥⁴ &ct.,

#Mathematics #HistoryOfScience #Notations #LeonardEuler #Analysis

Introductio in analysin infinitorum - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org
The Inquisitive Biologist

318 years ago today #CarlLinnaeus was born. The scholarly #biography The Man Who Organized Nature provides a full immersion in his life, revealing the polymath behind his reputation as the father of taxonomy.

inquisitivebiologist.com/2024/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Taxonomy #Botany #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #SciComm @princetonupress