ABSTRACT

Like Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s emblematic ‘Geometrie’, Record performs the ambivalent gesture of averting his gaze, to fix it on his pragmatic, pen-drawn geometric points. The story of Aristippus’s shipwreck, told by an eminently practical mathematician, confirms of geometric science what Francis Bacon suggests of geometric artifice and what the story of Plutarch’s Archimedes implies: that it confers a very portable social credit, and thus redeems the strangeness of the foreign. More concrete evidence for the advancing status of practical mathematics in the seventeenth century lies beyond institutional education, and in the lives of individual mathematicians who succeeded, as many of their predecessors had failed, in making careers as mathematical practitioners. A notable example of the mathematical career that flourished largely away from elite court circles and the universities is that of William Leybourn. Leybourn makes no appearance in Lisa Jardine’s densely realized map of the social context of Christopher Wren’s seventeenth-century mathematics.