British mathematical reformers in the nineteenth century: motivations and methods Winner of the BSHM undergraduate essay prize 2022

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A ‘fluxion’ can be anachronistically seen as derivative with respect to time; it is the instantaneous rate of change of a time-varying quantity (or ‘fluent’). See (Newton 1671).

2 The use of ‘function’ here is anachronistic; see (Stedall 2008, ch. 9) for a discussion of functions through time.

3 Woodhouse was a Lucasian professor at Cambridge who researched pure mathematics. For more information, see (Guicciardini 2009).

4 This line may very well be a pun on religious groups who would spread ‘theism’. By D-ism, Babbage means adherence to differential notation which prominently used ‘d’s. For more, see (Guicciardini 2009) and (Enros 1979)

5 For more on this text and the curriculum of the École Polytechnique see (Domingues 2008, 284–320).