Prof. Paddy Barry of University College Cork gave the weekly WIT maths/physics seminar today, entitled ‘School Geometry in Modern Times’. During the seminar, Prof Barry touched on that familiar theme, the loss and eventual recovery of Greek maths and science.
It was interesting to hear this story from the perspective of maths rather than science. Euclid’s Elements date from about 300BC, and the productive period of Greek geometry lasted until about 400 AD. Following the collapse of the Roman empire, Europe lapsed into the Dark Ages, throughout which learning and scholarship were minimal. Thanks to the conservation of classical scholarship by Islamic scholars, a gradual recovery began in Europe about 1000 AD, culminating in the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries (all this is of course true for Greek science as well as maths).
The strange aspect of the story is that the painstaking recovery of classical maths and science made it appear sacred. In fact, we now know much of Aristotlean science was wrong (due to lack of experimentation), but it was only against the greatest resistance that reformists such as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo gradually made headway. For example, it is a well-known fact that many of Galileo’s main opponents were in the universities, not in the Church. Still, the scientific method won out in the end…
And what of Greek maths? Euclidean geometry was at first embraced throughout Europe. Around the 1500s, reformists such as Petrus Ramus got to work in France, and the French approach to geometry was followed in most continental European countries. However, England was more conservative. Thanks to Oxford and Cambridge, Euclid’s Elements remained the dominant treatment until 1903. There followed then an adaptation of the Elements, exemplified in A School Geometry by Hall and Stevens. ..
So, given the different treament of Greek maths and science, it could be said that in England at least, there was a decisive split between maths and science right from the time of Galileo! I can’t help wondering if this split might why English science played quite a small role in the early 20th century revolutions in theoretical physics – there’s no question that quantum theory (QT) and general relativity (GR) were dominated by German-speaking countries in the early years. I guess it’s a coincidence as GR invoves curvilinear geometry, and QT involves none at all..