Remember this post? And Alistair Gentry‘s video about Elizabethan metaphysics, and the math teacher worrying about what seemed a proximity of science and magic?

“I’m alarmed,” he wrote in a comment. “Must I consider myself akin to devils, ghosts and magic?”

Well no – but he certainly would have, had he been an Elizabethan mathematician. Or, at the very least, he wouldn’t have been especially alarmed to consider his studies akin to magic. Certainly any number of his contemporaries – not to mention several religious authorities would have thought so, with a potential array of more or less dangerous consequences. But it is safe to assume that the mathematician himself wouldn’t have disagreed at all… Continue reading →