Oxford Figures, Chapter 1: 800 years of mathematical traditions

Figures

Portrait of Robert Grosseteste, Oxford's first Chancellor and a strong influence on the early intellectual life of the University, from a fourteenth-century manuscript.

Roger Bacon's study on Folly Bridge later became a place of pilgrimage for scientists. Samuel Pepys visited it in 1669, remarking:`So to Friar Bacon's study: I up and saw it, and gave the man 1s ... Oxford mighty fine place.'It was pulled down in the eighteenth century for road widening.

The earliest mathematical book to be published in Oxford was Compotus manualis ad usum Oxoniensium, printed by Charles Kyrforth in February 1520. Slight and unoriginal in mathematical content, its opening image records astronomical instruments as well as bearing evidence of the scribal culture upon which Oxford built its traditions of scholarship.

Merton College's fourteenth-century Mob Quad has seen six centuries of mathematical activity.

Oxford almanac for 1344, with notes on square numbers written by the Mertonian Simon Bredon. Owners of the manuscript have included John Dee and Thomas Allen.

John Wallis's Institutio logicae, first published in 1687, was intended to provide a foundation of undergraduate learning.

Lewis Carroll's game of "Logic" (1886) was an attempt to teach the principles of the syllogism. It proved most effective when he himself was doing the teaching, which he did at women's colleges and girls' schools in Oxford.

Alfred Swinburne's Picture logic of 1875 employed vivid imagery to help Oxford undergraduates acquire a rudimentary logical understanding: `Large or small, young or old, flesh or stone, you must all pass through, for Professor Logic isn't particular about the matter, all he concerns himself with is the form.'

Cista mathematica, the great triple-locked mathematical instrument chest, was part of Sir Henry Savile's provision for the study of mathematical sciences at Oxford. The historian R. T. Gunther speculated `whether at the time of its making all the mathematical learning within the University was to be compressed within its eleven feet of capacity'.

An alabaster model associating the five classical orders of architecture with the five Platonic solids, probably used in the seventeenth century for geometry teaching.

The pillars decorating the central tower of the Schools quadrangle (1613-24) correspond to the five orders of architecture. At this end ofthe quadrangle the Savilian professors lectured, the professor of astronomy setting up his instruments in the tower.

Robert Record's cosmology textbook Thecastle of knowledge demonstrated a humanist scholar's respect for and knowledge of the past.

Throughout the history of Oxford, libraries have played a central role in mathematical teaching and scholarship: left, Merton College Library, 1370; right, the Whitehead Library in the Mathematical Institute, 1960.

Treatments of a work of Archimedes over two centuries from 1676, 1792, and 1837 illustrate the Oxford tradition of historical scholarship.

Robert Gunther, the founder of the Museum of the History of Science, pictured in about 1930 with a wood and pasteboard astrolabe by the seventeenth-century Oxford instrument maker John Prujean; this astrolabe is illustrated on page 72.

Compotus manualis ad usum Oxoniensium, 1520.

Canicularia, by the first two Savilian professorsof astronomy, was one of the first Oxford books to use Arabic type.

The refounding in Oxford of the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, in 1930, signalled and promoted the increased research activity of Oxford mathematics led by G. H. Hardy.

Title page and image from Chaundy et al.'s The printing of mathematics.

Writing books of popular scientific expositionis a tradition long associated with Oxford mathematicians.

The nineteenth-century Savilian professor Baden Powell wrote his history of the physical and mathematical sciences as a way of promoting scientific awareness and removing public prejudices and misconceptions about the pursuit of science.

John Wallis.

A page from a 1392 manuscript, probably in the hand of Geoffrey Chaucer, discusses in English an astronomical instrument, the equatorium (a planetary computer); the work may be based on an earlier Latin version by Simon Bredon, a Fellow of Merton College.

Merton College's astrolabe is engraved `Lat.52.6/m Oxonia' and was made around 1360 for use in Oxford. It was probably bequeathed to the College by Simon Bredon.

J. J. Sylvester, founder of the Oxford Mathematical Society.

W. L. Ferrar.

Oxford has always been at the forefront of new technology: in this cartoon of the 1880s a student telephones answers to the geometry examination to his friend in the exam Schools.

By the 1980s, three of the professors at the Mathematical Institute had received the Fields Medal, the prestigious international award for younger mathematicians sometimes regarded as the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize: Michael Atiyah (1966), Simon Donaldson (1986), and Daniel Quillen(1978).

The success of a former Merton College student, Andrew Wiles, in proving Fermat's Last Theorem in the 1990s recalls the international position last held by the University of Oxford when the Merton School was in its prime, six and a half centuries before.