Thomas Morel Profile picture
Dec 16, 2022 9 tweets 5 min read Read on X
🥳Publication day for #UndergroundMathematics! Thanks to everyone involved❤️

Here’s a short🧵to its main argument: How did practical mathematics and a culture of accuracy developed in EM Europe? Rationality wasn’t just about scholars, it included craftsmen and artisans too!
Practical mathematics was ubiquitous, from wine gauging to mercantile arithmetic. It was widely depicted, as here in ‘The Measurers’ (see Jim Bennett’s great piece on this painting @HSMOxford). And yet, usual narratives have forgotten a whole discipline: subterranean geometry!
The Geometria Subterranea was also known as Markscheidekunst or ‘the art of setting limits’. These surveyors were working underground in the silver mines of the Empire, in Scandinavia and Spain, but who knows what their mathematics was? Or how it was taught and improved?
Virtually forgotten today, subterranean geometry was once a big deal! Christian Wolff put it on the title page of his Mathematisches Lexicon, Leibniz took careful notes on the topic: rulers and scholars all wanted to now how practitioners could be so accurate underground…
It was performed by craftsmen trained hands-on in the mines. They had their own instruments, their own manuscripts, even their own language – the Bergmannsprache! Using lots of archive, I reconstruct how they worked and why geometry was so important, in the mines and beyond...
The development of #UndergroundMathematics mirrors larger developments: in every arts and crafts, quantification and accuracy were silently gaining ground. Early modern mathematics isn’t just about the ‘scientific revolution’, it’s a way broader cultural development!
My book presents case studies about maps, manuscript and prints, religion and politics set in the mines, in schools and at courts. The example of subterranean geometry shows the complex relationships between craftsmen and scientists, and the huge impact of practical mathematics!
‘A sophisticated, authoritative and original analysis’ (Jim Bennet), a ‘thoroughly researched book [that] presents fascinating stories’ (Ursula Klein, @MPIWG), it ‘offers a rare glimpse on how a specific mathematical culture developed’ (Jeanne Peiffer,@CAK_UMR)! #HistSTM
Thanks to all the people who helped me during the nine (yes, 9) years it took to complete this project ❤️. I sincerely hope you’ll find this a stimulating reading!

Preorders at @CambridgeUP and all kind of information cambridge.org/9781009267304!

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More from @Thomas__Morel

Nov 25, 2022
Today a 🧵on mining maps, how to look at them, and what they tell us about how people perceived the underground world! With bits of map history, paper history, and obviously lots of #UndergroundMathematics. For the untrained eye, these maps are difficult to understand... #HistSTM
These maps are in fact a recent development, mostly in the 17th century. An old miner’s proverb said that “no one can see through stone”, and in fact it used to be a huge problem: how to see limits of concessions, to locate water wheels and ore vein?
In the 15th c. there was virtually no room for maps. Extraction was monitored directly, by visitations from mining masters and jurors, as their ‘Augenschein’ (visual inspection) was decisive. Things began to change bc rulers wanted to monitor their underground riches at distance
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