Scientific Revolutions as Convolutions? A Sceptical Enquiry

Ivor Grattan-Guinness

A chapter in Amphora, 1992, pp 279-287 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Thanks to the encouragement of Hans Wussing and the commercial courage of the houses of Birkhäuser (Basel) and the Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften (Berlin), I was able to publish in 1990 a large work of 1600 pages entitled Convolutions in French mathematics, 1800–1840 [G.-G. 1990a]. It treats of a golden but little-studied epoch in the history of science, when France was by far the leading mathematical country in the world and an extraordinary galaxy of major figures converted ‘calculus to mathematical analysis’ and ‘mechanics to mathematical physics’, to quote from the sub-title of my book. Major changes were wrought in the period that I studied, and the temptation to begin the title of my work ‘French revolutions in ...’ was very great. Yet it had to be resisted; although priority rows and plagiarism charges occurred (following a distinguished Parisian tradition!), no truly revolutionary events happened, involving (for example) some sort of illegal activity or procedure.

Date: 1992
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-0348-8599-7_14

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