MATHEMATICS IN ENGLISH PRINTED BOOKS , 1473 – 1800 : A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS by

This essay represents a first attempt to make sense of the mass of early modern English publications that deal with or refer to mathematics, using a bibliometric approach made possible by the new electronic databases: Early English books online and Eighteenth-century collections online. I present statistical information about references to mathematics in this corpus of books, perform some statistical analysis of the trends that the data show, comment on the methodological problems raised, and assess what these results do and do not tell us about early modern English discussion of mathematics.