Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.17445

    Diagrams in papers for Commercium Epistolicum

    Date
    1 September 1676
    Creator
    Unknown, Artist
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p3
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 317mm
    width (page): 202mm
    Subject
    Description
    Figures in John Collins's copy of Ehrenfried de Tschirnhaus's letter to Henry Oldenburg, dated 1 September 1676, Paris. An extract of this letter, without the figures, was printed in Commercium Epistolicum (1712, 1722), compiled to prove Isaac Newton’s priority over Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the invention of calculus.

    These figures are based on John Wallis's discussion of dividing the periphery of a circle into equal parts, and giving equations suitable to both an even and uneven number of divisions (printed in Treatise of angular sections (1684)). Similar ideas were discussed in James Gregory, Geometriae pars universalis (1668).
    Transcription
    Endorsed 'No. 54: p. 157'.
    Transcribed by the Making Visible project
    Object history
    Extract (without the diagrams) printed in Commercium Epistolicum D. Johannis Collins, et aliorum De analysi promota (London: Typis Pearsonianis, 1712), p. 66; Commercium epistolicum D. Johannis Collins, et aliorum de analysi promota (London: J. Tonson & J. Watts, 1722), pp. 141-42.
    Related fellows
    James Gregorie (1638 - 1675, Scottish) , Mathematician
    Henry Oldenburg (1612 - 1677, German) , Scientific correspondent
    John Collins (1625 - 1683, British) , Mathematician, Mathematician
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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