The Academic Medical Library of Paris (BIUM) has the pleasure to announce
the e-publication of M.J.B. Orfila's works on its website. With introductions by J.R. Bertomeu (Universitat de Valencia) and D. Gourevitch (EPHE Paris). (Site available only in French)
Although these achievements are fundamental to modern mathematics and physics, it is less well known that Newton himself placed great value on his private researches into theology and alchemy. Interest in the wealth of surviving manuscript material in these areas has increased dramatically in recent years, and the Newton Project was formed in 1998 to make all Newton's texts, both 'scientific' and 'non-scientific' (including those papers relevant to his three decades service at the Royal Mint), available to a broad readership in a form that is at once scholarly and accessible. The Project aims to create a printed edition of Newton's theological, alchemical and administrative writings and an electronic edition of all his writings, including his correspondence.
The Newton Project is an effort to release online the complete record of Isaac Newton’s published and unpublished writings. Certainly, Newton was one of the most important figures in the history of modern science, and the Project offers a substantial contribution to this field by offering historians unprecedented access to his archives. Although the work is far from finished, the text offered on the site thus far is both a key resource for historians and a model for the online publication of historic manuscripts.
The greatest success of the Newton Project is its multi-layered presentation of the historical manuscripts. The Project fully utilizes the hypertext medium to balance the historical integrity of the subject with acts of editorial clarification. Each transcription can be displayed in several formats. The first, “normalised,” format is edited and omits deleted text, expands unfamiliar abbreviations, corrects spelling, and offers something like a final draft, which represents what Newton most likely intended a reader to see in his text. With this option, the editors allow a viewer to quickly access Newton’s writing without struggling to decipher the meanings of difficult marks and indications. The next format, termed “diplomatic,” attempts to preserve the process of the text’s original production by graphically indicating text that has been marked through, squeezed between the lines, or includes special characters. When a viewer rolls the mouse over these notations, a pop-up textbox gives an editorial note describing the nature of each irregularity. In addition to these two formats, photographic images of some manuscripts are available for closer reading and verification. A viewer can easily switch between these three formats to find the level of authenticity or editorial influence with which he or she is comfortable.
The site is well designed, attractive, and professional. The main text appears under the title banner in the middle and right side of the screen, while a list of navigation links on the left leads to a description of the project’s background, biographical information, and sections that highlight new, featured, and upcoming additions to the site. Individual pages are also cross-linked to make navigating the site simple. The site also includes an extensive bibliography, a guide to the source collections, and dozens of links to other Newton sites as well as many other history-of-science and manuscript publishing sites.
A final important consideration of online history is the concept of permanence. This idea is especially pertinent to the Newton Project because they only recently extended their funding for another five years. But, to the Project’s credit, the creators have already arranged for the online transcriptions to be deposited with the Oxford Text Archive to guarantee sustainability in the unlikely event that additional funding is unavailable in the future. Once again, the Newton Project has successfully addressed a major challenge of online history.
Miles Travis
Center for History and New Media
February 5, 2005
From the Multi-Repository Mathematics Collections site you will gain access to three of the most significant mathematics collections digitally available: The Mathematics Collection from Cornell, the Mathematics Collection from Göttingen, and the University of Michigan's Historical Math Collection. From this access point you will be able to search across all three of these collections, and examine results as you would normally using the University of Michigan's user interface. It is important to point out that the University of Göttingen has only one item for which a fulltext search can be performed, but bibliographic searches across the collection are possible.
The Archives of American Mathematics (AAM) is one of the collection components available at the Center for American History's Research and Collections Division. AAM is dedicated to preserving the records of American mathematicians and American mathematical organizations for use by mathematicians, historians, and others interested in the history and development of American mathematics and science.
X-ray Astronomy at Goddard:
Early History
From 1965 to 1972 there were over a dozen balloon-borne experiments (mostly from New Mexico), including the first such to take place from Australia (1966), one in which hard X-ray emission was discovered (albeit with crude angular resolution) from a region towards the galactic center whose centroid is located among subsequently identified sources GX1+4, GX3+1, and GX5-1. A balloon-borne experiment in 1968 was based on the multi-anode multi-layer xenon gas proportional chamber that had recently been developed in our lab and represented the first use of such a high performance instrument for X-ray astronomy.
Until quite recently, I though that the first published HR diagram was constructed by Ejnar Hertzsprung for the stars of the Pleiades. Already in 1908, when Hertzsprung (then still an amateur astronomer with training in photochemistry) visited Karl Schwarzschild at Göttingen, he brought with him a working version with photographic magnitudes plotted against effective wavelengths. To determine the latter quantity, nowadays replaced by spectral type or color index, Hertzsprung attached a coarse diffraction grating before the objective so that an ordinary stellar image on the photographic plate was accompanied by a very short first-order spectrum on either side. The separation of the most intense parts of these spectra then directly translated into the effective wavelength of the star's light. However, this first Hertzsprung attempt to visualize the relation between luminosities and colors of stars suffered from a systematic error due to influence of the secondary spectrum of the objective. It was not until 1911, when the satisfactory version of the diagram was presented (Publ. Astrophys. Observ. Potsdam 22, 1, 1911) together with a color-magnitude diagram for another winter cluster, the Hyades.
n the Third Annual Report of the Henry Draper Memorial, attention is called to the fact that the K line in the spectrum of Zeta Ursae Majoris occasionally appears double. The spectrum of this star has been photographed at the Harvard College Observatory on seventy nights and a careful study of the results has been made by Miss. A. C. Maury, a niece of Dr. Draper. The K line is clearly seen to be double in the photographs taken on March 29, 1887, on May 17, 1889 and on August 27 and 28, 1889. On many other dates the line appeared hazy, as if the components were slightly separated, while at other times the line appears to be well defined and single.
Goddard Space Flight Center Library
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Mathematics represents a high level of abstraction attained by the human mind. In India, mathematics has its roots in Vedic literature which is nearly 4000 years old. Between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. various treatises on mathematics were authored by Indian mathematicians in which were set forth for the first time, the concept of zero, the techniques of algebra and algorithm, square root and cube root.
