The Arithmetic of Infinitesimals: John Wallis 1656 (Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences) [Hardcover]

John Wallis (Author), Jacqueline A. Stedall (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0387207090 | ISBN-13: 978-0387207094 | Edition: 1

John Wallis (1616-1703) was the most influential English mathematician prior to Newton.  He published his most famous work, Arithmetica Infinitorum, in Latin in 1656.  This book studied the quadrature of curves and systematised the analysis of Descartes and Cavelieri.  Upon publication, this text immediately became the standard book on the subject and was frequently referred to by subsequent writers.  This will be the first English translation of this text ever to be published.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the reviews: "John Wallis (1616-1703) was the most influential mathematician in England … . in his Arithmetica infinitorum (Arithmetic of Infinites), he extended traditional algebra of finite numbers and symbols … . The translator, Dr. Jacqueline Anne Stedall, has already accomplished important research on John Wallis and his mathematics and thus is ideally qualified for both the translation and a scholarly introduction and explanatory notes. She also supplies a glossary, a bibliography, and an index, while figures and tables are reproduced as facsimiles from the original edition." (Christoph J. Scriba, SIAM Review, Vol. 47 (2), 2005) "The author has done a superb job with the translation and accompanying introduction. Her expertise with the subject is readily apparent. She has rendered a valuable service to the mathematical community with this English translation of Arithmetica infintorum. One can sense the anticipation and excitement Newton must have felt upon first reading the work." (James J. Tattersall, Mathematical Reviews, 2005e) "Jackie Stedall is amazing. … here is her translation of John Wallis’s famous Arithmetic of Infinitesimals (Arithmetica Infinitorum, first published in 1656). Thank you, Jackie; please never stop. Wallis’s subtitle gives a good summary of what the book is about: ‘A New Method of Inquiring into the Quadrature of Curves, and other more difficult mathematical problems’. … Stedall’s translation gives us access once again to this fascinating book, and her introduction helps us understand its place in history. Not to be missed." (Fernando Q. Gouvêa, MathDL, December, 2004) "This is an English translation of John Wallis’s famous Arithmetica infinitorum of 1656, a milestone in the prehistory of the calculus, whose influence on Newton was important. The translation preceded by a historical introduction recalling Wallis mathematical contributions and the genesis of his most famous book. … It is a very useful addition to the literature about the history of calculus." (Jean Mawhin, Bulletin of the Belgian Mathematical Society, Vol. 12 (2), 2005) "This book is famed above all for its infinite product for p, which duly appears among the final ‘propositions’; and for this reason it is often regarded as a study of the quadrature of the circle. In fact it has a broader remit … relationships between arithmetic and geometry, and between discrete and continuous magnitude, especially in connection with quantitative properties of various classical curves, surfaces and solids. … This volume belongs to considerable recent efforts on English mathematics during the 17th century." (I. Grattan-Guinness, The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 89 (515), 2005) "To the modern reader the ‘Arithmetica infinitorum’ reveals much that is of historical and mathematical interest, not least the mid seventeenth-century tension between classical geometry on the one hand, and arithmetic and algebra on the other. Newton was to take up Wallis’s work and transform it into mathematics that has become part of the mainstream, but in Wallis’s text we see what we think of as modern mathematics still struggling to emerge. … a relevant text even now for students and historians of mathematics alike." (Zentralblatt für Didaktik der Mathematik, January, 2005)

From the Back Cover

John Wallis was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford University in 1649. He was then a relative newcomer to mathematics, and largely self-taught, but in his first few years at Oxford he produced his two most significant works: De sectionibus conicis and Arithmetica infinitorum. In both books, Wallis drew on ideas originally developed in France, Italy, and the Netherlands: analytic geometry and the method of indivisibles. He handled them in his own way, and the resulting method of quadrature, based on the summation of indivisible or infinitesimal quantities, was a crucial step towards the development of a fully fledged integral calculus some ten years later. To the modern reader, the Arithmetica Infinitorum reveals much that is of historical and mathematical interest, not least the mid seventeenth-century tension between classical geometry on the one hand, and arithmetic and algebra on the other. Newton was to take up Wallis’s work and transform it into mathematics that has become part of the mainstream, but in Wallis’s text we see what we think of as modern mathematics still struggling to emerge. It is this sense of watching new and significant ideas force their way slowly and sometimes painfully into existence that makes the Arithmetica Infinitorum such a relevant text even now for students and historians of mathematics alike. Dr J.A. Stedall is a Junior Research Fellow at Queen's University. She has written a number of papers exploring the history of algebra, particularly the algebra of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her two previous books, A Discourse Concerning Algebra: English Algebra to 1685 (2002) and The Greate Invention of Algebra: Thomas Harriot’s Treatise on Equations (2003), were both published by Oxford University Press.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (August 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387207090
• ISBN-13: 978-0387207094
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,631,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A historical juwel, September 21, 2005

By 

Roland Suttels (Belgium) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Arithmetic of Infinitesimals: John Wallis 1656 (Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences) (Hardcover)

If you want to study mathematics, in particular rational numbers, concepts of infinity and relation with geometry, this book is not very effective, be it only for the tedious style of formulation.

But when you look at the book from its historical importance and understanding of the mathematical reasoning in the 17th century, this book is to be considered as a masterpiece, or (why not) a collectors item.

The book is a translation from latin and is further complemented with an introduction by Dr Stedall, helping a lot to put the work in the right frame of its importance, that a Geometrical problem is reduced to a pure arithmetic problem.

The text also illustrates, some of the shortcuts taken in that period of history, such as the concept of proof by induction.

I do not intend to read the book from start to end, but I am regularly studying one chapter, to immerse myself in the reasoning at that time. I can not stop to be amused and amazed by the way John Wallis contempories are corresponding with each other.

What to think about "To the most Distinguished and Worthy gentleman and most Skilled Mathematician Dr William Oughtred..."

This book gets four stars, and I would give six stars if there would be a mapping for each proposition into modern language.

The book is expensive, as all these type of books, but its worth the money.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Infinite series and Wallis's product formula, January 11, 2007

By 

Viktor Blasjo - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Arithmetic of Infinitesimals: John Wallis 1656 (Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences) (Hardcover)

From Stedall's introduction: "In De sectionibus conicis, Wallis found algebraic formulae for the parabola, ellipse and hyperbola, thus liberating them, as he so aptly expressed it, from 'the embranglings of the cone'. His purpose in doing so was ultimately to find a general method of quadrature (or cubature) of curved spaces, a promise held out in De sectionibus conicis and taken up at length in the Arithmetica infinitorum ... Wallis's major contribution to the development of seventeenth-century mathematics was perhaps, as he himself recognized, the transformation of geometric problems to the summation of arithmetic sequences. Many of the results demonstrated by Wallis were already well known but, as he repeatedly pointed out, his aim was to establish a method by which those results, and others, could be systematically obtained ... From his startingpoint of simple powers, he could easily handle sums (or differences) of sequences, and hence eventually quadratures of any curve of the form y=(1-x^(1/p))^q provided p and q were integers. But because his ultimate aim was the quadrature of the circle, the curve he was really interested in was y=(1-x^2)^(1/2) ... In what was perhaps the one real stroke of genius in Walli's long mathematical career, he saw how to complete his [solution] by a method now set out in Proposition 191, and so arrived at his infinite fraction for 4/pi", namely 3*3*5*5*7*7*.../2*4*4*6*6*8*...

So what was this "one real stroke of genius"? Well, to find pi we need to integrate (1-x^2)^(1/2). Today we would feel like using the binomial series expansion, but this is not available to Wallis so he more or less has to invent it. The binomial series expansion for an integer exponent is of course given by Pascal's triangle, but to expand things like (1-x^2)^(1/2) we need a corresponding "fractional entry" sitting between two lines in Pascal's triangle. We don't know what that entry should be, but remember that we can integrate (1-x^(1/p))^q, which can be interpreted as a fractional entry in Pascal's triangle. So we do this for a bunch of integers p and q to get an enlarged Pascal's triangle with fractional entries and then use ordinary properties of Pascal's triangle extended to the fractional setting to deduce the value for the entry we want.