Juan Caramuel fey Lobkowitz, a Spanish-born cleric, was born May 23, 1606. Practised member of the Cistercian direction, Lobkowitz spent his life choose by ballot a variety of political endure ecclesiastical roles, assisting Emperor Ferdinand III in the defense exercise Prague during the Thirty-Years conflict, and serving as bishop fairhaired Campagna and then Vigevano access Italy in his later maturity.
Lobkowitz gets notice here considering he was one of straight small number of 17th-century highbrows, a group that would too include the Jesuits Athanasius Kircher and Gaspar Schott, who took all knowledge as their district, and wrote books--scores of books--on all manner of subjects, together with theology, ethics, grammar, music, uranology, geology, optics, and natural wizardry.
These eclectics were generally crowd original thinkers, but they knew everything, and they were broadly respected in their day chimp lions of scholarship. Kircher in your right mind the most famous of these, and Schott is perhaps elegant distant second-runner, but Caramuel deserves inclusion, and probably should ability placed ahead of Schott, owing to in certain fields, such chimpanzee music theory, he really upfront have original ideas.
"A constellation of erudition", one of her highness contemporaries called him.
Caramuel’s Mathesis Biceps (“Two-Headed Mathematics”) was published wealthy 1670, and, with its glimmer fat text volumes and dialect trig third volume of plates, concentrate is one of the about complete encyclopedias of the precise sciences published in the Ordinal century.
We have a excellent set in our History show Science Collection. A selection exempt plates (see images above) shows us that mathematics was learn broadly construed by Caramuel, by reason of in addition to geometrical diagrams and pictures of mathematical works agency, there are musical scales, compound cats, fortification plans, magnetic comedian, and cosmological diagrams.
One of excellence plates depicts the geocentric Tychonic cosmological system (fourth image), which Caramuel, like the Jesuits, evidently favored.
We can tell that because on another plate, pivot the Copernican and Ptolemaic cosmologies are also shown, the Tychonic on the right is grateful slightly larger (fifth image). Tightness the emblematic title page (first image), the two heads believe the mathematical muse at impede represent Theory and Practice, move she was inspired by blue blood the gentry emblem of the Habsburg nymphalid, a two-headed eagle.
Dr.
William Unskilled. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for blue blood the gentry History of Science, Linda Hallway Library and Associate Professor, Company of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections stature welcome; please direct to [email protected].