Lecture

Alchemical Practices and Lab Notebooks

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In courses (2)

HUM-402: Experimental history of science I

The course allows students to learn by doing about the history of science, and the role played by experimentation, technical skills or material objects in the production of knowledge. Students will explore these topics by reconstructing a historical experi ...

HUM-466: Experimental history of science II

Description

This lecture explores the historical significance of alchemical practices, recipe books, and lab notebooks as written forms of knowledge transmission, covering the evolution from recipe books to lab notebooks, the epistemological, social, symbolic, and commercial functions of recipe books, and the diverse purposes and forms of recipe books. It delves into the use of lab notebooks in experimental history of science, emphasizing their role in capturing tacit skills and embodied knowledge, as well as revealing underlying paper practices.

Instructors (2)

Simon François Dumas Primbault

Simon holds a PhD in the history of science from the joint programme of the European University Institute (EUI, Florence) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris). His doctoral dissertation focused on the drafts and working papers belonging to two natural philosophers of the second half of the 17th century – Galileo’s last disciple Vincenzio Viviani in Florence and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Hannover – and could be described as a work of historical anthropology of knowledge. By addressing the ink-and-paper materiality of these supposedly purely intellectual operations that scatter the mechanical and physico-mathematical papers of Viviani and Leibniz, he aims at seizing knowledge and scholars in statu nascendi. Studying closely down to the most subtle details of the activity of the scholars’ hands on the paper of their notes, and with the support of anthropology, history of art, literature, or history of emotions, Simon hopes to flesh out anew a historical epistemology too conceptual and positivist still.

Ion-Gabriel Mihailescu

Official source

Related concepts (4)

Notebook interface

A notebook interface or computational notebook is a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming, a method of writing computer programs. Some notebooks are WYSIWYG environments including executable calculations embedded in formatted documents; others separate calculations and text into separate sections. Notebooks share some goals and features with spreadsheets and word processors but go beyond their limited data models. Modular notebooks may connect to a variety of computational back ends, called "kernels".

Project Jupyter

Project Jupyter (ˈdʒuːpɪtər) is a project to develop open-source software, open standards, and services for interactive computing across multiple programming languages. It was spun off from IPython in 2014 by Fernando Pérez and Brian Granger. Project Jupyter's name is a reference to the three core programming languages supported by Jupyter, which are Julia, Python and R. Its name and logo are an homage to Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter, as documented in notebooks attributed to Galileo.

Generating function

In mathematics, a generating function is a way of encoding an infinite sequence of numbers (an) by treating them as the coefficients of a formal power series. This series is called the generating function of the sequence. Unlike an ordinary series, the formal power series is not required to converge: in fact, the generating function is not actually regarded as a function, and the "variable" remains an indeterminate. Generating functions were first introduced by Abraham de Moivre in 1730, in order to solve the general linear recurrence problem.

Symbolic method (combinatorics)

In combinatorics, the symbolic method is a technique for counting combinatorial objects. It uses the internal structure of the objects to derive formulas for their generating functions. The method is mostly associated with Philippe Flajolet and is detailed in Part A of his book with Robert Sedgewick, Analytic Combinatorics, while the rest of the book explains how to use complex analysis in order to get asymptotic and probabilistic results on the corresponding generating functions.

Related concepts (4)

Notebook interface

Project Jupyter

Generating function

Symbolic method (combinatorics)