Artifacts

Examining the History, Navigation, and Landfall of Christopher Columbus

Close to the strictly-technological contribution given by Sandretto in the past 50 years to the development of plastics material processing, the Company promoted a series of cultural activities to provide the general public with wider and deeper information on this important segment of the industry. The most relevant achievement is the Plastics Museum of Pont Canavese, close to Turin, in northern Italy. This is the first Italian Museum of Plastics, and one of the main ones on a worldwide basis. The collection was initiated in 1985 and grew with the years, counting today more than 2500 catalogued pieces. Four years after the opening day, in June 1995, tenths of thousands of visitors have enjoyed the rooms of Sandretto's Plastics Museum.

In the Mathematical Laboratory of the University Museum of Natural History and Scientific Instruments there are about 160 mathematical machines built by teachers of Liceo A.Tassoni in the scope of an innovation project for the teaching of geometry developed by the Nucleo di Ricerca in Storia e Didattica della Matematica (University of Modena) . The project , coordinated by prof. Mariolina Bartolini Bussi (bartolini@unimo.it) has produced mathematical machines, didactical itineraries, animation films and simulations by computer. With these teaching aids we introduce a historical dimension and a manipulative and visual one in our classrooms. Our didactical research purpose is the historical contextualization of problems, of theories and of methods.Many "machines" realize projects or ideas of mathematicians, from the Ancient Greek up to now. For the use of these "machines" in the classroom, students have to elaborate abstract themes and proofs.

University of Florida Society for the History of Medicine presents:
The History of Medicine Lecture Serie

he Historical Collection, located on the third floor of the Eskind Biomedical Library, contains many rare and fascinating books, a large collection of medical instruments, and thousands of photographs documenting the history of Vanderbilt Medical School. Shelved in cherry wood cabinets in an elegant reading room, you will find over 12,000 medical and nursing texts.

There are three principal modes of accessing the manuscript: Folio pages can either be reached via the list of folio pages, covering folio pages 33 to 196 (see the description of the content of the manuscript), via indices of words, numbers, and variables, or via related propositions of the Discorsi.

The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution, and it serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with more than 126 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include nearly 19 million books, 2.6 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 56 million manuscripts.

Chinese New Year is the main holiday of the year for more than one quarter of the world's population; very few people, however, know how to compute its date. For many years I kept asking people about the rules for the Chinese calendar, but I wasn't able to find anybody who could help me. Many of the people who were knowledgeable about science felt that the traditional Chinese calendar was backwards and superstitious, while people who cared about Chinese culture usually lacked the scientific knowledge to understand how the calendar worked. In the end I gave up and decided that I had to figure it out for myself.

The Museum of the History of Science houses an unrivalled collection of historic scientific instruments in the world's oldest surviving purpose-built museum building, the Old Ashmolean on Broad Street, Oxford. By virtue of the collection and the building, the Museum occupies a special position, both in the study of the history of science and in the development of western culture and collecting.

The HTA publishes high quality articles, books, essays, documents, historical photos, and links, screened for content, for a broad range of historical subjects.
Founded in 1990 in Mississippi as an anonymous FTP site, when the World Wide Web became readily available in the US, it became a Web site as well.