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James Jurin (1684-1750) occupied a central place in the medical and scientific circles of Augustan and Georgian England. His dispassionate yet forceful advocacy of smallpox inoculation using an innovative statistical approach brought him widespread recognition both in Britain and abroad. He was Secretary to the Royal Society for seven years and participated vigorously in the most important scientific debates of the period. Jurin's correspondence, recently made available to the public, provides rich material for the study of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and medicine, especially of the smallpox inoculation debates. This volume reproduces a broad and valuable selection of letters, as well as a list of Jurin's publications and a calendar of the complete correspondence. The introductory biographical essay describes how Jurin combined a career as a successful London physician with that of a natural philosopher.
In 1742, when the legendary dome atop St. Peter’s Basilica—designed by Michelangelo—cracks and threatens to collapse, Pope Benedict XIV summons three mathematicians to help, whose revolutionary ideas spark a chain of events that will change the world of architecture forever. 1742: the famous dome atop Saint Peter’s Basilica, designed by Michelangelo, is fractured and threatened with collapse. The dome is the pride of Italy and the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. And no one knows how to fix it. This engaging and colorful narrative tells the overlooked story of how Michelangelo’s Dome was saved from disaster by three mathematicians and Pope Benedict XIV, who had asked them...
This book is one of the finest I have ever read. To write a foreword for· it is an honor, difficult to accept. Everyone knows that architects and master masons, long before there were mathematical theories, erected structures of astonishing originality, strength, and beauty. Many of these still stand. Were it not for our now acid atmosphere, we could expect them to stand for centuries more. We admire early architects' visible success in the distribution and balance of thrusts, and we presume that master masons had rules, perhaps held secret, that enabled them to turn architects' bold designs into reality. Everyone knows that rational theories of strength and elasticity, created centuries la...
The history of science, the history of women, and gender history – Gendered Touch offers new perspectives on the intersections between the textual and the embodied nature of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe.
Climate can be defined as an ensemble of many weather phenomena. Clima tologists often use the mean (conventionally the monthly and annual mean) of weather-related parameters to describe climate. The mean value, however, is not all the climate. Climatic changes might occur if certain aspects of the distribution of extreme values change, while the mean does not. Katz and Brown (1992), for example, show from a theoretical viewpoint that in a changing climate, extreme values are determined more by changes in variability than changes in the mean. Possible changes in extreme event frequency receive considerable attention along with the global warming, because extremes directly impact human society and the economy. For most societally sensitive extremes and related changes in their vari ability, an analysis based on daily data becomes necessary. This paper considers two aspects (relative and absolute values) of extreme temperatures on a daily basis. We do not consider spells of extreme days, periods which will likely have greater socio-economic and health impacts (Kalkstein et al., 1996; Wagner, 1999), than individual extreme days.