Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐 @bibliolater@social.cleverlibre.org

Fwiw, I’ve seen a few dates attached to this result. Some sources say Newton received Bernoulli’s “programma” announcing the problem on 1/29; others say it was late 1696 and then the solution appeared in Philosophical Transactions in January 1697.

Newton’s niece Catherine Conduitt recalled him receiving the problem in January 1697. She said he returned home from the Tower of London at 4pm tired from “the hurry of the great recoinage,” then staying up until 4am to solve the problem.

The problem was also solved by Jacob Bernoulli, Leibniz, and L'Hôpital. Jacob Bernoulli's solution was especially elegant, an important early step in using variational calculus to solve physical problems.

Isaac Newton was made aware of Jean Bernoulli's "brachistochrone" problem #OTD in 1697. He solved it later that evening, showing that the curve of fastest descent between two points was given by a portion of a cycloid.

Newton published his solution anonymously in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Bernoulli would later say that the identity of the author was obvious; he recognized "the lion by his claw."

This is not a right triangle, but it's awfully close.

The largest angle is 90.000003°.

@TammyGentzel @bibliolater @bookstodon
I get you! I bought an iPad Air a couple of years ago specifically to use an eReader with a large screen - 27 months later still haven't read a single book on it!

@Lenin @TammyGentzel @bibliolater @bookstodon
Oh heck yes, so right! Sigh, second hand book shops are the best... If I ever finish unboxing my library/book collection from moving house its what my house might start to smell like! 😆

Two of the king's men supported the Frenchmen's story that they had been headed for England - they said that "they could see it from their ship's instruments". Which makes me very curious! What does that mean? Had they plotted London into their GPS?
Anyway, it seems they were believed, were allowed to buy a new sail, anchor and rope and sent on their way.
Fin.

The Danish scribe gave the captain's name as Johann de Samelssen, and the merchants as Horti Gudfridssen, Ricard Hossze and Gudfrid Geladt.

Blowing that far off course on a voyage from Rouen to London does sound very... unfortunate. But definitely possible. 12 years before, a ship headed from Crete to Flanders ended up off Røst in the Lofoten Islands.

Today's brief glimpse into Medieval sources: 580 years ago today, a ship's captain and three merchants from Rouen in Normandy appeared before a court in Bergen, Norway, after their ship was seized by the local royal representative in Karmsundet, near present Haugesund, Norway. The merchants said they were heading for London, but had been blown off course.
The court asked: "Are you absolutely sure you're not pirates or spies??" They answered definitely not, just heading for London.
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#history

@bibliolater @reading @bookstodon
T.M. Scanlon’s “What We Owe To Each Other”.

It is closely reasoned and deliberative. It takes me a long time to internalize his arguments before I can go on to the next section.

Plus the font is small, and my eyes are not what they once were. <wink>

@bibliolater @reading @bookstodon

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. It was a surprising bestseller for the time (1988) but I doubt many people finished it. I fell off the horse at about page 30, and at the same point over a decade later. There will be no third attempt.

Astronomer Johannes Hevelius was born #OTD in 1611.

The discovery of four comets; the publication of the first comparatively detailed map of the Moon and the introduction of seven new constellations - Canes Venatici, Lacerta, Leo Minor, Lynx, Scutum, Sextans and Vulpecula - all of which are still in use today and which first appeared in his star atlas ‘Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia’, published posthumously in 1690.

#science #astronomy
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@bibliolater @reading @bookstodon If you’re into speech act theory, you should definitely search out the very obscure 1979 book “Intention and Communication” by Thomas Wetterström. It’s almost unknown and almost unreadable. But it is also full of concepts and distinctions perfectly essential to speech act theory that you won’t find anywhere else (except for in Wetterström’s other, even more obscure works in Swedish!).

@bibliolater @reading @bookstodon Some 20th century philosophers, even of the rigorously analytical kind of persuasion and even when brilliant minds and making good sense in the end, were less than brilliant pedagogically. I read Whitehead’s short “Concept of Nature” recentishly, and it was tough going. (I am a philosopher at Gothenburg university.) I found it rewarding, but you need an interest in the stuff for it to be worth the trouble.