It is fitting that Professor Dirk Jan Struik be greeted with this melange of mathematical, scientific, historical, sociological and political essays. The authors are also appropriately varied: different countries, outlooks, religions, generations, and we suppose - of course we did not as- different politics too. Many more would have joined us, we know, but the good friends in this book make a fine and representative assembly of the intersection of two (mathematical!) classes: affectionately respect ful admirers of Dirk Struik, and the best thinkers of this troubled century. Struik has been among the most steadfast supporters of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, that discussion group which we have been holding at Boston University since 1960, but his luminous collaboration has been welcome, in Boston and Cambridge, for nearly five decades among mathematicians, physicists, philosophical and political thinkers, and especially among the students. It has not mattered whether they have been his own students or not, whether at M.LT. or elsewhere, whether scholars or dropouts, nature-lovers or book worms, anarchists or Republicans, Catholics or Unitarians, Communists or communists, prim or liberated. No doubt he has his preferences! But the main thing for Struik has been to educate and respect the other person.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
I/Mathematics. - The Lemniscate of Bernoulli. - Summation of Series of Fractions Depending upon the Roots of the Airy Function. - Wave Propagation in Non-Viscous Fluids. - Polyhedral Numbers. - Materialist Mathematics. - Skew Curves Setting up a Null System in Space. - Über ein Beispiel zur unbestimmten Analytik und seine allgemeine Bedeutung. - Remarks on Two-By-Two Matric Semigroups. - A Unified Approach to Hypernumbers. - Some Remarks on the Concept of Limit. - La notion de fonction chez Condorcet. - II/History of Mathematics and Science. - The Modern Use of Historical Chinese Solar Observations. - The Second Part of Chapter 5 of the De arte mensurandi by Johannes de Muris. - Isaac Newton, the Calculus of Variations, and the Design of Ships. An Example of Pure Mathematics in Newton s Principia, Allegedly Developed for the Sake of Practical Applications. - The Impact of von Staudt s Foundations of Geometry. - Georg Samuel Dörffel. - Observational, Rational and Scientific Medicine in Mexico. - History of Science: A Subject for the Frustrated. Recent Japanese Experience. - The Relation between Eudoxus Theory of Proportions and Dedekind s Theory of Cuts. - Rheticus as Editor of Sacrobosco. - Is Euclid on the Skids? . - John Pell s English Edition of J. H. Rahn s Teutsche Algebra. - Could the Specific Heat of the Elements Have Contributed to the Discovery of the Periodic System? . - III/The Nature Of Mathematics, Philosophy and Science. - Die Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung an der Akademie der Wissenschaften der D. D. R. Ergebnisse und Ziele. - Ethics and Science. - A Religion of Earth. The Twentieth Century Scientific Revolution and Organized Religion. - Some Heretical Ideas with Respect to Mathematics and Physics. - A Note on Robert Hodes. - Aims and Methods of Scientific Research. -The Concept of `Simplicity in the Physico-Mathematical Sciences. - Should Science Survive Its Success? . - Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of the Will. - The Accelerator and the Virgin: The Rise & Fall of Two Cults. - A Note on the Concept of Scientific Practice. - Ideology, Expression, and Mediation. - Is Science Rational? . - On the Philosophical Meaning of Observational Errors. - IV/Cultural and Political Questions. - Falsification in History. - The Evolution of Black Nationalism (1971). - The Secret of Jheronimus Bosch. - Self-Determination in Theory and Practice. - The Appeal of Marxism in the United States. - Relative Values and the Quest for Socio-Political Standards. - Dirk Struik and the Sociology of Science. - What Is Burgerlijk? Analysis of a Dutch Concept. - American Anti-Imperialism and the Russian Revolution. - Lenin and the Americans at Kuzbas. - Pre-School Education and Its Role in Social Change: A New Zealand Example. - Toward a Critique of Economics.
