David’s Reviews > Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World > Status Update

Hobbes and Leviathan.

The last part was a bit of a tangle, with the arguments about how to compute the relative widths of the indivisible lines, etc., to make the results turn out in a reasonable way!

Lots of background about religious quarrels in the 16th century and how they led to the founding of the Jesuits. They did study math, but really from the angle of math being a perfect (and presumably unchanging) body of knowledge, not something subject to change as a result of creative research.

Already smiling at the familiar sound of arguments just in the intro, eg if there is some "smallest" particle that exists in the measuring of lengths, yielding some number of pieces, couldn't the given length be divided in half first & then into that many pieces, yielding twice as many pieces of half the size, so smaller than the smallest theoretical piece? Et cetera. :-)