The year 2023 marks the 550th anniversary of birth Polish scholar Nicolaus Copernicus. Usually deemed one most emblematic examples scientific revolution and theory paradigm shift in history science, heliocentric proposed by Copernicus 1543 has fed minds philosophers historians for centuries. Recently, increasing attention been put on recognition sources that might have influenced Copernicus’s c...

There are four books describing early studies and views on light, optics and vision that are considered to be landmarks in this branch of science. The first of these is Euclid’s Optica, published about 300BC, in which he postulated that light travelled in straight lines; he described the laws of reflection and described them mathematically. The second is by Ptolemy. He is best known for his 15 ...

© 2003 American Institute of Physics, S-0031-9228-0311-020-4 P the most remarkable aspect of the growth in our understanding of the universe is that we understand anything at all. Beyond the obvious regularities of the seasons, the Assyrians noted, as early as 700 BC, that the planets appeared to move in a complex semiregular pattern and that solar eclipses were possible only at the new moon, w...

once the greek astronomy's most worthy masterpiece, ptolemy’s almagest, was translated into arabic, many scientific works were produced in islamic civilization. the genre known as hayʾa, which deals with the cosmological aspect of astronomy, gradually seperated itself from other astronomical branches. while these branches were in relation with each other, their goals were different. comput...

The Farnese Atlas is a Roman statue depicting the Titan Atlas holding up a celestial globe that displays an accurate representation of the ancient Greek constellations (see Figures 1 and 2). This is the oldest surviving depiction of this set of the original Western constellations, and as such can be a valuable resource for studying their early development. The globe places the celestial fi gure...

This is a brief overview of the lives and contributions of S. L. Sobolev and L. Schwartz, the cofounders of distribution theory. In the history of mathematics there are quite a few persons whom we prefer to recollect in pairs. Listed among them are Euclid and Diophant, Newton and Leibniz, Bolyai and Lobachevskĭı, Hilbert and Poincaré, as well as Bourbaki and Arnold. In this series we enroll Sob...

In August 1861 the London-based newspaper The Times published world’s first “daily weather forecast.” term itself was created by enterprising meteorologist Robert FitzRoy, who wanted to distance his work from astrological “prognostications.” That story has led a widespread assumption that forecasting is an entirely modern phenomenon and in earlier periods only quackery or folklore-based signs w...