Mathematical Errors
Some proofs in the work being "botched", as Noel Malcolm puts it, De Corpore had a negative effect on Hobbes's scholarly reputation. The inclusion of a claimed solution for squaring the circle, an apparent afterthought rather than a systematic development, led to an extended pamphlet war in the Hobbes-Wallis controversy
Read more about this topic: De Corpore
Famous quotes containing the words mathematical and/or errors:
“As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewed and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)