history-of-science

this page compiles material related to: letter to Auguste Chevallier 29 May 1832 scan of original: (wikipedia) French original text: (web) English translation: (pdf) commonly known as la lettre testament or Galois’ last letter, since, famously, the morning after writing it the author died in a duel. The letter announces Galois’ solution to the “solvability of equations by radicals”. It is commonl…

Encephalitis lethargica killed five hundred thousand people, and scientists still can’t agree on what it was.

Nature, Published online: 04 June 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01770-8 Researchers analysed the scientific impact of dual-use research in US patent records and bibliometric databases.

An electromechanical marvel called the Bombe decrypted thousands of WWII messages.

In The Elgar Companion to Émile Durkheim. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 331-349. 2026In the 1960s Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase “masters of suspicion” to describe Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud for their ability to reveal the hidden or repressed meanings or truths located in texts or social and psychological phenomena. Philosophers, theologians, and literary theori…

_Intellectual History Review_. forthcomingIn this article, I analyze Johann Christoph Sturm’s characterization of Cartesianism and his response to Descartes’s philosophy and that of his followers. In his days, Sturm (1635–1703) was an important philosopher and professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Altdorf. Sturm has a balanced reading of Descartes, neither echoing the polemics…

Scientific dating proves streaks on walls of Bacon Hole, near the Mumbles in south Wales, is Palaeolithic rock art In 1912, the Guardian reported on the discovery of Palaeolithic rock art on the walls of Bacon Hole, a cave near the Mumbles in south Wales – only for the painted panel’s authenticity to be dismissed by 1928. A series of horizontal bands in red pigment were subsequently deemed no mor…

In The Interactive Field in Analysis (Vol. 1). Chiron. pp. 121-141. 1995This article focuses on the relationship between alchemy’s ancient hermetic vessel and a topological structure found in modern mathematics: the Klein bottle. The paradoxical properties of the hermetic vessel are described in detail, primarily as brought out by Jung. I then turn to the Klein bottle and my “alchemical” interpre…

Mehak Jain, BA LLB, Thakur Ramnarayan College of Law ABSTRACT “An unjust law is itself a species of violence” – Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi M. K., 1922) Under British rule, the Britishers mapped out the legal system to maintain order and reinforce control. Codified laws, structured courts, and formal procedures were introduced to regulate society and repression. However, the use of these laws often sh…

The memoirs of German judge Paul Schreber, who litigated his own asylum release, inspired Freud and still have a lot to teach doctors and patients about respect for the mind.

Business computer pioneer and the UK’s first professor of information systems November 2026 will mark the 75th anniversary of the world’s first commercial job run on a stored program computer. On 29 November 1951, the Bakery Valuations job calculated the costs, earnings and margins of the baked goods produced by J Lyons & Co, which was then the UK’s largest catering firm and the first business in…

In the early 1830s, London was a city defined by the clatter of industrial machinery and the soot of rapid modernization. Yet, within its drawing rooms and cramped workshops, a quieter, more profound revolution was taking shape. It was during this pivotal period, between 1833 and 1834, that a young Ada Lovelace underwent a conceptual shift—one that would transition her from a student of mathemati…

The MCC Library has gone from three books to a proper archive with scrapbooks, letters, diaries and newspaper cuttings In the spring of 2011, I went to the MCC library at Lord’s – the world’s largest collection of printed material on cricket. I was near the start of a PhD on the history of women’s cricket and I wanted source material: this, surely, would be where I would find it? Nope. When the M…

The history of human disciplines is fundamentally a story of resistance against “living difficulties” (high Load). This paper reinterprets the birth of eight major academic fields through the lens of Load Minimization Theory (LMT: L = U + F + E). It argues that disciplines emerged as collective attempts to reduce Uncertainty (U) and Friction (F), ultimately seeking An-soku (deep relational rest).…

The Null Contribution: What Did Watson and Crick Discover? J. L. Nielsen Watson and Crick's 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA is 842 words long, reports no experiments, and presents no original data. This paper demonstrates that it contains no original conclusions. A systematic comparison of every structural claim in the Watson–Crick paper against the documented contents of Rosalind Frank…

Seeking a Language in Mathematics 1523-1571 Cuthbert Tunstall, later Bishop of London and then Durham, published the first book on mathematics conceived and printed in England in 1523; it was a commercial arithmetic written in Latin. By the time of Thomas Digges's publication of his book on geometry in 1571, the use of English in mathematical publications and the practical arts' had become establ…

Previously classified photos and documents show the scientific work that went into the world's first atomic test in 1945 – a test that, just weeks later, would see nuclear bombs dropped in Japan

Grothendieck is revered in the world of math; outside of it, he’s known for his unusual life, if he’s known at all. But what were his actual mathematical contributions? The post How Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Tim Rood and Phil Coughlin on Xi Jinping’s reference to the Thucydides trap in a meeting with Donald Trump In explaining Xi Jinping’s allusion to the Thucydides trap, Kate Lamb refers to Thucydides’ statement that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable” ( What is the Thucydides Trap and why did Xi Jinping mention it in his meeting with Donal…

_Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science_:58-69. 2019We are going to trace the ideas and experiments, since Galileo and until Léon Foucault, aimed at proving the Earth’s rotation. Galileo, incorrectly, tried to explain the phenomenon of tidal forward and backward flow with the Earth’s rotation. After Galileo, the cannon shots towards the zenith and the experiments on …