book cover: Matteo Valleriani: Metallurgy, Ballistics and Epistemic Instruments (2013)
Publication
Metallurgy, Ballistics and Epistemic Instruments: the Nova Scientia of Nicolò Tartaglia – a New Edition

In 1537, Nicolò Tartaglia (1500–1557), a mathematician from Brescia, published 'Nova scientia'. It was this work that led to the foundation of the modern science of ballistics. Tartaglia’s intention was to create a purely mathematical science based on axioms, which was fundamental to the entire subject of mechanics, starting with a limited number of principles and arriving at a series of propositions through a rigid procedure of deduction. Nevertheless, as Tartaglia himself states, his motive was fundamentally practical and connected to the activities of the sixteenth-century bombardier. A new edition of Nicolò Tartaglia’s Nova scientia, based on the 1558 print run of the second enlarged edition (1550), shows how the emergence of theoretical ballistics was a consequence of the technological innovations that took place in the frame of the practice of iron casting at the turn from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century.

Publisher
Edition Open Access
ISBN
978-3-8442-5258-3
Year
2013
Language
English, Italien
Series
Max Planck research library for the history and development of knowledge, sources ; 6