Changing Images in Mathematics

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Umberto Bottazzini and Amy Daban Dalmedico

LESSONS FROM RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE

Over the last few decades, the classical approach to the history of science and technology has been challenged profoundly. One might take T.S. Kuhn's celebrated book [1962] as the starting point of a ‘new’ historiography whose central issues were concepts such as revolutions in science, ‘normal’ science, and scientific paradigms. In the context of the 1960s, it was the notion of revolution which was the most striking. With hindsight, however, we can see that it was not this which had the greatest long-term impact, but rather the insertion of the concept of scientific community into the ancestral confrontation of Subject vs. Nature, characteristic ...