[HN Gopher] Roger Bacon (1214 - 1292) - Biography (2003)
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       Roger Bacon (1214 - 1292) - Biography (2003)
        
       Author : abudabi123
       Score  : 47 points
       Date   : 2023-04-10 12:27 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk)
        
       | smcin wrote:
       | Medieval cancel culture! Imprisoned incommunicado by his fellow
       | Franciscans in the convent in Ancona, Italy, 1278-1290 for
       | teaching views too novel.
        
       | _hao wrote:
       | Calling Bacon just a mathematician (first sentence of the text)
       | seems quite reductive. Other than that it was an interesting
       | read. I think the Wikipedia page is better -
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon
        
       | kloch wrote:
       | Trivia:
       | 
       | There is a street named after him (Rodger Bacon Dr.) in Reston,
       | VA.
       | 
       | Right across from it is Isaac Newton Sq, where the lab that
       | discovered the Reston Ebola Virus was located. Around the corner
       | is Michael Faraday Dr.
        
       | jvican wrote:
       | Yesterday I finished reading "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto
       | Eco for the second time. Fantastic book. It talks about a series
       | of crimes in an abbey, and one of the lead characters, William of
       | Baskerville, is a Franciscan logician who uses his mind and
       | deductive abilities to eventually find the common thread among
       | the crimes. He knew and regards Roger Bacon as his master many
       | times in the book, and also mentions William of Occam. Highly
       | recommended to read. It's a masterpiece.
        
       | lordleft wrote:
       | I love this biography because it shows how contact with the
       | Islamic world was beneficial and generative to the West (and put
       | the West back in contact with aspects of its intellectual
       | inheritance that it had lost, like the thought of Aristotle).
        
         | kitd wrote:
         | "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco touches on these themes.
         | Its lead character, William of Baskerville, is very much in the
         | Roger Bacon mold.
        
         | MisterTea wrote:
         | Its too bad the Islamic world did an about face and stopped
         | progressing.
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_attitudes_towards_scie...
        
           | dang wrote:
           | Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's
           | the last thing we need, and fortunately is particularly
           | avoidable.
           | 
           | Fortunately your other recent comments have all been good HN
           | posts--thank you!
        
           | valarauko wrote:
           | This is something bought up every time science is mentioned
           | in the context of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, but
           | it's more nuanced than that. Every civilization goes through
           | cultural trends, and Luddites are universal. It's also
           | helpful to think of scientific progress accelerating in
           | places where different civilizations can interact, and the
           | core Arab lands had reached a sort of homogeneity by the
           | Middle Ages, and some level of intellectual stagnation,
           | pretty similar to Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Contrast
           | with parts of the Islamic world at the periphery, and you see
           | a great deal of innovation. The early Ottoman period was one
           | of major technical innovation, as was the Indian
           | subcontinent.
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-12 23:02 UTC)