
Room 252
Vincenzo De Risi graduated in philosophy and mathematics at the University of Rome and received his doctorate in philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He was a DAAD fellow at the Leibniz-Archiv in Hannover, and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2016, he was an Independent Research Group Leader at the MPIWG, leading a research group investigating the history of geometry in relation to the history of the concept of space. In 2016-17, De Risi was appointed Leibniz Professor at the University of Leipzig, and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. Since 2017, he has been a senior research fellow in the
French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), working at the “Laboratoire SPHère - Science, Philosophie, Histoire” in Paris. He has been a visiting scholar at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the University of Urbino, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California Irvine, and Stanford University. In 2021, he is Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council, Princeton University. His studies focus on the history of geometry, the history of epistemology, and the history of the philosophy of space from antiquity to the early modern age. He also has a project on the history of axiomatics in mathematics, and has led a collaborative project between the MPIWG and SPHère on the tradition of Euclid's Elements in the modern age. He is the guest editor of the forthcoming volumes of the Academy of Sciences edition of Leibniz's mathematical writings (geometrical papers, 1677-1716). He is the editor of the "Frontiers in History of Science" series from the publisher Birkhäuser.
Projects
The History of Axioms: Mathematical Principles from Antiquity to the Modern Age
Selected Publications
Ademollo, Francesco, Fabrizio Amerini, and Vincenzo De Risi, eds. (2022). Thinking and Calculating: Essays in Logic, Its History and Its Philosophical Applications in Honour of Massimo Mugnai. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science 54. Cham:…
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De Risi, Vincenzo (2022). “Aristotle on Common Axioms.” In Thinking and Calculating: Essays in Logic, Its History and Its Philosophical Applications in Honour of Massimo Mugnai, ed. F. Ademollo, F. Amerini, and V. De Risi, 53–82. Cham: Springer…
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De Risi, Vincenzo (2021). “Euclid’s Common Notions and the Theory of Equivalence.” Foundations of Science 26: 301–324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09694-w.
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De Risi, Vincenzo (2021). “Gapless Lines and Gapless Proofs: Intersections and Continuity in Euclid’s Elements.” Apeiron 54 (2): 233–259. https://doi.org/10.1515/apeiron-2019-0012.
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Past Events
Workshop
Euclid on the Road. Cross-Cultural Transmission, Translation, and Transformation of the Elements
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- Institute Event
Geometry and Philosophy of Space in Isaac Barrow
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Geometry and Mechanics
MOREColloquium
On Euler’s Spherical Geometry
MOREColloquium
Ancient Theorems and Problems
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Geometrical, Astronomical and Geographical Notions of Space in the Renaissance
MOREColloquium
On the Early History of Subterranean Geometry. Elements of Context and Possible Influences
MOREColloquium
Frege’s Grundlagen §64 and the Mathematical Practice of Definitions by Abstraction in the Nineteenth Century
MOREColloquium
Geometrizing World Images. How Geometry Shaped R.J. Boscovich’s Natural Philosophy
MOREColloquium
The Telling of the Unattainable Attempt to Avoid the Casus Irreducibilis for Cubic Equations: Cardano’s De Regula Aliza
MOREColloquium
L'enseignement de la Géométrie par Conrad Dasypodius, à Strasbourg, au XVIe Siècle
MOREColloquium
Poincaré’s Creation of Algebraic Topology: “Reasoning Well from Badly Drawn Figures”
MORESummer Colloquium
On David Hilbert’s Arithmetization of Geometry: the Axiomatic Method and the Unity of Mathematics
MORESummer Colloquium
Ptolemy on Uniform Circular Motion
MORESummer Colloquium
Quantities and Causation: Leibniz’s Use of the Principle of the Equivalence of Hypotheses
MORESummer Colloquium
The ‘Euclidization’ of Ptolemaic Astronomy in the Middle Ages
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