jstor, burgomastering

1) most-hated nonprofit: jstor

2) In Struik's HOM book, in the final paragraph of The Seventeenth Century:

And just as Newton's vagueness provoked the criticism of Berkeley, so Leibniz's vagueness provoked the opposition of Bernard Nieuwentijt, burgomaster of Purmerend near Amsterdam (1694).

I'll bite:  who the hell was Nieuwentijt?  He doesn't seem to merit a Wikipedia page, which suggests he might be an interesting person.  Here, (if that Google books megalink survives clickthrough), Leibniz is recorded as writing in 1703 (referring to the burgomaster):

...we must not regret the effort needed to justify our Analysis against all kinds of persons capable of understanding it.

I guess the good old days of Calculus Skepticism have gone for good, but it's nice to know the name of another of its practioneers.  Read on in that link and you'll see that the dweller in Purmerend near Amsterdam had his own infinitesimal theory, and wrote nastigrams back and forth to Leibniz and his seconds over several years. 

Those were the days, the days of the Calculus Flamewars!

But Calculus won the day, and here I am, a lonely enquirer, exploring the gravesites of the fallen heroes of Calculus Skepticism. 

That book, Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century, by Paolo Mancosu, might be worth having.  Looks like it's fairly recent (1999).

Comments

[Graham]

What about jstor makes you so grumpy? I presume access is prohibitively expensive for non-academics....

[Thane Plambeck]

yes, that's it

same with the math reviews ("we can offer you a $7K/year personal subscription")

need to make my own university or plunk in a rogue wifi node at stanford

[Account Deleted]

Yeah, I tunnel into Stanford or Caltech whenever I need access to JSTOR---it's good to keep your academic connections, no matter how flimsy