Oxford Figures, Chapter 1: 800 years of mathematical traditions

The instrumental tradition

Oxford is fortunate in having a most impressive collection of mathematical and scientific instruments, situated in one of its finest seventeenth-century buildings. The Old Ashmolean building was opened in

1683, as a museum and centre of scientific activity, and returned to housing what became the Museum of the History of Science in 1925. Although few of the instruments were made locally, and not all of them were used in the University, the presence of the collection is a strong reminder that an instrumental dimension has always accompanied mathematical teaching and research in Oxford.

Many instruments associated with Oxford have been associated with astronomical concerns in a calculational or observational way, from Richard of Wallingford's remarkable albion in the fourteenth century, to the instruments constructed by John Bird for the Radcliffe Observatory four and a half centuries later. There are a large number of sundials around Oxford, some designed by early Savilian professors. Other instruments, extant or known about from a variety of records, were used for mathematical calculation or in connection with the range of applied mathematical sciences taught at Oxford as part of a liberal education.

Mathematical models too, in the sense of physical objects showing geometrical shapes, have long accompanied teaching. An early such model, perhaps used by the Savilian Professors of Geometry in the seventeenth century, takes the form of a five-sided alabaster column, each face representing one of the classical orders of architecture, with a display of models of the five Platonic solids. This association between the five classical orders and mathematical learning is found again in the `Schools quadrangle', where the early Savilian professors taught, and was referred to in a course syllabus issued by David Gregory in 1700 proposing a practical geometry lecture on `the five orders of pillars and pilasters'. A visitor to the Bodleian Library in 1710 described the alabaster model as one of the sights of Oxford. The plaster mathematical models bought by the University in the late nineteenth century for geometry teaching are a more recent example of this tradition.

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