Although I am currently writing a chapter on biographical portrayals of Newton “as a mathematician”, I am, by no stretch of the imagination, an historian of mathematics. The reason is, in large part, because I am not a mathematician. Now, I am also not a physicist, or a geographer, or a chemist or an astronomer, or a scientist (or woman of science) of any other description, having finished my formal scientific education with Higher Chemistry (a Scottish qualification, for those unsure, taken around the age of 16/17), yet I have written about aspects of the history of all of those disciplines.
I get away with it because history of science has long since moved away from focusing entirely on the content of the science and has embraced approaches that consider science in its widest social and cultural contexts. The battles between ‘internalists’ and ‘externalists’ in history of science are (mostly) behind us, and the subject is the richer for being able to take lessons from both spheres, and for including individuals with a range of backgrounds. History of mathematics, though, was one of the last remaining bastions of internalism.Read More »
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