Tag Archives: Instititute for Historical Studies

Past talk:
Hosted by the Institute for Historical Studies
3:30 pm, Weds., March 25                                                                                       GAR 4.100

Alberto Martínez

“The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths”

This talk is part of the Institute for Historical Research’s series of workshops, so please RSVP Courtney.

The Cult of Pythagoras shows how myths evolve in the history of mathematics. Some tales are partly true, others entirely false, but all show the power of invention in history. Pythagoras emerges as a symbol of the urge to conjecture: he has been credited with fundamental discoveries in math and the sciences, yet there is nearly no evidence that he really contributed anything to such fields at all. This book asks: how does history change when we subtract the many small exaggerations and interpolations that writers have added for over two thousand years?

UT History Professor Martinez is the author of several books including The Cult of Pythagoras (2012) and Science Secrets: The Truth About Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths (2011).

Past talk:
Hosted by the Institute for Historical Studies
12:00 Monday, February 16                                                                               GAR 4.100

Bruce Hunt

“The Bottom Line: Cables, Commerce, and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire”

This talk is part of the Institute for Historical Research’s series of workshops, so please RSVP Courtney to receive the pre-circulated paper. 

The networks of telegraph lines that began to spread across Britain, the United States, and Continental Europe in the 1840s and early 1850s had far-reaching effects on the dissemination of news and the operation of markets. They also had deep effects on electrical science. In this paper, I will argue that what might at first appear to be a prime example of pure science—the development of electromagnetic field theory in Britain in the middle decades of the 19th century—was in fact driven in important ways by developments in the telegraph industry, particularly British scientists’ and engineers’ encounters with puzzling new phenomena that turned up on underground wires and undersea cables in the early 1850s.

Bruce J. Hunt completed his Ph.D. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 1984 and has taught at The University of Texas since 1985. He is the author of The Maxwellians (1991) and Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein (2010) and numerous articles on the history of electrical science and technology. His current work focuses on the growth of the global telegraph network in the nineteenth century, and how work in that industry  shaped the development of electrical physics, particularly in Britain.