Publicaties

This paper gives an overview of the scarce occasions in which Japan came into contact with Western arithmetic and algebra before the Meiji restoration of 1868. After the refutation of persistent claims on the influence through Japanese students at Leiden during the seventeenth century, it concentrates on the reception of Dutch works during the last decades of the Tokugawa shogunate and the motivations to study and translate these books. While ...

In this chapter, the thesis is proposed that old techniques from Old-Babylonian surveyors survived through oral traditions within the practices of 17th-century engineers and lay surveyors. By means of a case study on a popular Dutch book of the early 17th century it is shown that the author Hans Sybrandt Cardinael shied away from algebraic methods for solving quadratic problems and instead insisted on the use of a cut-and-paste geometry which ...

Recent successes within Artificial Intelligence with deep learning techniques in board games gave rise to the ambition to apply these learning methods to scientific discovery. This model for discovering new scientific laws is based on data-driven generalization in large databases with observational data using neural networks. In this study we want to review and critical assess an earlier research programme by the name of BACON. Though BACON was ...

While scaled thermoscopes were developed only at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the medical tradition had already started to quantify some secondary qualities towards the end of sixteenth century. However, degrees of heat and cold were only meaningful in connection with Galenic-Aristotelean ontology, consisting of elements, temperaments and degrees of the four humours. The first graduated thermoscopes transformed the prevailing ...

The early calculus is a popular example of an inconsistent but fruitful scientific theory. This paper is concerned with the formalisation of reasoning processes based on this inconsistent theory. First it is shown how a formal reconstruction in terms of a sub-classical negation leads to triviality. This is followed by the evaluation of the chunk and permeate mechanism (C&P) proposed by Brown and Priest in (Journal of Philosophical Logic, ...