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Kepler, Cavalieri, Guldin. Polemics with the Departed

2015; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-00131-9_4

2296-6080

Patricia Radelet-de Grave,

History of Science and Medicine

The present chapter concerns an argument which placed three authors in epistolary opposition: Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647) and Habakkuk Guldin (1577–1643, who later changed his first name to “Paul”). The dispute in question was started by Guldin in 1640, 10 years after Kepler’s death, upon the publication of Book II of the De centro gravitates, and continued a year later with Book 4. The fourth chapter of this book criticized some of the demonstrations of the Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum, published by Kepler in 1615, and the fifth chapter criticized Cavalieri’s Geometria indivisibilibus (which came out in 1635, though at least six of the seven books that constitute it had been finished 6 years earlier). Cavalieri responded and counter-attacked, after Guldin’s death, in the third exercise, entitled In Guldinum, of the Exercitationes geometricae sex, published in 1647, a year which also marked his own death.