Differences: Chaos in the History of the Sciences
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2012, volume 30, pages 369 ^ 380
doi:10.1068/d6810
Differences: chaos in the history of the sciences
Michel Serres
¨ Academie Francaise, 23 quai de Conti, 75270 Paris cedex 06, CS 90618, France ° Translated by Taylor Adkins 3047 Hollywood Drive, Decatur, GA 30033, USA
Abstract. In this paper from the book Les origines de la geometrie (The origins of geometry), subtitled ¨ ¨ tiers livre des fondations (third book of foundations) (Serres, 1993, Flammarion, Paris), I argue that the history of the sciences and, in particular, the history of mathematics cannot be written using the tools and models of traditional historiography. Rather, I claim that there is a need for a science of history that takes seriously what I see as a radical contemporaneity or copresence of the archaic and the contemporary. The model of history that I propose attempts to seek a degree of congruence between a model of time that is not chronological but rather percolating and filtering the ways that the mathematical tradition is reinvented. There existsöor seems to exist öa structural similitude between mathematics itself and the form or model of historiography required to write its history.
Several sciences, several histories The history of the mathematical sciences transforms as soon as their invention is investigated, and so profoundly sometimes that it seems to change nature more than allure. In fact, it sometimes seems to follow regular lines of expansion or growth, spirals of resumptions or circles of invariance, sometimes undergoing abrupt declines, reversals, or gaps through forgetting, stabilities, or ongoing preservation ... . Ten different models of stagnation, regression, or progress, either discrete or continuous, could be composed in such a way as to lose the orientation of their development the moment the complex variety of these different fluxes, networks, or spectra is observed. We therefore doubt the meaning of the history of
doi:10.1068/d6810
Differences: chaos in the history of the sciences
Michel Serres
¨ Academie Francaise, 23 quai de Conti, 75270 Paris cedex 06, CS 90618, France ° Translated by Taylor Adkins 3047 Hollywood Drive, Decatur, GA 30033, USA
Abstract. In this paper from the book Les origines de la geometrie (The origins of geometry), subtitled ¨ ¨ tiers livre des fondations (third book of foundations) (Serres, 1993, Flammarion, Paris), I argue that the history of the sciences and, in particular, the history of mathematics cannot be written using the tools and models of traditional historiography. Rather, I claim that there is a need for a science of history that takes seriously what I see as a radical contemporaneity or copresence of the archaic and the contemporary. The model of history that I propose attempts to seek a degree of congruence between a model of time that is not chronological but rather percolating and filtering the ways that the mathematical tradition is reinvented. There existsöor seems to exist öa structural similitude between mathematics itself and the form or model of historiography required to write its history.
Several sciences, several histories The history of the mathematical sciences transforms as soon as their invention is investigated, and so profoundly sometimes that it seems to change nature more than allure. In fact, it sometimes seems to follow regular lines of expansion or growth, spirals of resumptions or circles of invariance, sometimes undergoing abrupt declines, reversals, or gaps through forgetting, stabilities, or ongoing preservation ... . Ten different models of stagnation, regression, or progress, either discrete or continuous, could be composed in such a way as to lose the orientation of their development the moment the complex variety of these different fluxes, networks, or spectra is observed. We therefore doubt the meaning of the history of
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