In this seminar, we will explore texts on nature from philosophy, history, science, art, and cinema, incorporating diverse viewpoints.

The heart of this course will be a close reading of eighteenth century texts concerning the mathematical description of the wave motion of a vibrating string. We will look closely at texts by Bernoulli, D'Alembert and Euler and observe how visions of the world are intertwined with the development of the mathematical methods.

The heart of this course will be a close reading of “the most unread famous book in the Western world.", Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (first published 1687). In this course, we will read as much as we can of Newton's text, by focusing on how mathematical, and especially geometrical, methods involve a new world vision and a new practice of science.