![]() The Peasants’ Revolt in the 1520s showed how attacks on one kind of authority could spill over into the political realm. The religious challenges became intertwined with political ones. The Catholic Church responded by firming up church doctrines and institutions. ![]() Why did the Church get involved in evaluating the “new math” of indivisibles, infinitesimals, and the infinite? Catholicism had dominated medieval Europe, but by the sixteenth century had been challenged religiously by Protestantism. Let’s first look at that context, and then evaluate his conclusions. But Hobbes thought that Wallis’s arguments weren’t good geometry, and that the social order itself depended on sticking to Euclidean rigor.Īlexander’s provocative new book begins with a lively account of these two disputes and their historical context. Wallis had used these ideas to find the areas under the graph of \(y=x^n\) for rational \(n\). In England a couple of decades later, the mathematician John Wallis (the first to use the symbol \(\infty\) for infinity) and the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes clashed over whether the infinite and the infinitely small were mathematically legitimate. My Solid Geometry teacher didn’t tell us that. What we now call Cavalieri’s Principle was thought to be dangerous to religion. In the 1630s, when the Roman Catholic Church was confronting Galileo over the Copernican system, the Revisors General of the Jesuit order condemned the doctrine that the continuum is composed of indivisibles.
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