BSHM Meeting News

Abstract

s from past meetings BSHM Christmas Meeting Saturday 7 December 2019 University of Warwick Firstly, very many apologies for omitting Robin Wilson’s abstract from the report of the Christmas Meeting in the last issue of the BJHM. Robin very nobly stood in at short notice for a speaker who dropped out, and we are grateful to him for doing so. The missing abstract follows. Robin Wilson (Open University): Hunting and counting trees: the world of Cayley and Sylvester Where did the word ‘graph’ (in connection with graph theory) come from? How many paraffins are there with a given number of carbon atoms? In this illustrated talk I shall outline some contributions of Arthur Cayley and James Joseph Sylvester, with particular reference to the enumeration of trees and chemical molecules between the years 1857 and 1889. No previous knowledge of graph theory is assumed. Research in Progress Saturday 29 February 2020 Queens College, Oxford Brigitte Stenhouse (Open University) Conjuring the ‘Spirit of Laplace’: the analytical works of Mary Somerville (1780–1872) In the early nineteenth century, the need to increase the acceptance and utilization of analytical mathematics in Great Britain was keenly felt by a group of mathematicians, who saw it as a remedy to the perceived decline of British science. Thus in 1826, Mary Somerville began preparing what was intended to be a translation of Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste (printed in five volumes between 1799–1825). Published in 1831 under the title Mechanism of the Heavens, this work was received with great critical acclaim. There are, however, many key differences between the work of Somerville and that of Laplace. During the translation process, Somerville focused on preserving ‘the spirit of Laplace’ whilst making it both accessible and palatable to a British readership, through introducing diagrams and ideas of the sublime. Somerville treated but a small subset of the results found in the original work, but expanded and updated many sections by embedding relevant ideas from recent publications, all of which were notably developed outside of Britain. Whilst the work was thus described as ‘the most complete account of the discoveries of continental mathematicians in physical astronomy which exists in [English]’ (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society), it appears to have been commercially unsuccessful. Somerville’s second attempt at encouraging the study and adoption Volume 35 (2020) 181