It read “Jean de Montfort [possibly a pseudonym for Pascal] greatly desires that those distinguished gentlemen, the Professors of Mathematics, and others in England renowned for mathematical skill, may condescend to resolve this problem”.

A frenzy of cable-laying followed, and by 1871, punters in Calcutta could learn the result of the Derby no more than five minutes after the race was over. As the railway age loomed over the horizon, some were skeptical of the promised increase in the speed of travel.The railway and the steamship shrank global space as well, as it became increasingly possible to travel huge distances in an extraordinarily short time, as depicted in 1873 by Jules Verne in his novelAround the World in Eighty Days, a story quickly dramatized and presented on the stage, catering to the public's taste for the exotic. This created intolerable uncertainties of many kinds, in areas such as insurance, or legislation, by rendering the exact point when laws came into force, or insurance policies began to operate, indeterminate. For both aesthetic and symbolic reasons, Wren wanted the dome that you see from all across London, the defining shape of the cathedral, to be a hemisphere. The critic John Ruskin also feared that railways would prevent people from observing properly the scenery through which they passed: 'They are the loathsomest form of devilry now extant, animated and deliberate earthquakes, destructive of all wide social habit or possible natural beauty, carriages of damned souls on the edges of their own graves.

Today, Gresham plays an important role in fostering a love of learning and a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us. These are then equated to carefully positioned “stretched” or “prolate” cycloids – which of course Wren already knew how to find the length of, from his own earlier work. N. Wilson'sThe Victorians, with its chapters on France, Germany and Italy, India, Jamaica and Africa, and its coverage of Wagner, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And I can’t resist, passing on this compliment that Wren paid London in 1657: I must congratulate this City, that I find in it so general a relish of Mathematicks. A similar cultural development occurred in perceptions of space, as the Cubists in France and Vorticists in Britain began to represent people and objects seen not from a single vantage point by from many different angles simultaneously, as in C.

The actual general equation of a catenary curve passing through the origin is y= 1 2b ( e bx + e -bx -2 ), where bis a chosen fixed constant. Wren and Hooke believed that the perfect shape would in fact be the positive half of the curve y= x 3 .

But by 'history' Strachey in fact meantnarrativehistory, and indeed the challenge of writing a chronological account was and still is almost insurmountable, given the complexities of the age and the superabundance of evidence for them. The standardization of time went hand-in-hand with its increasing intrusion into everyday life, not just of people who traveled by train or sent telegrams or used the telephone, but of almost everyone. In the mid-1840s the poet William Wordsworth commented on the evils he feared would beset his beloved Lake District, in north-west England, if a projected railway line was built through it. A masonry hemisphere of the scale required would struggle to support its own weight, and would have no chance of supporting the additional (850 ton!Christopher Wren, who died 300 years ago this year, is famed as the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral. In the course of my exploration I will not simply confine myself to English or even British history, for Britain was connected to Europe and the wider world in multifarious ways during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The portrait I show, by Godfrey Kneller, alludes to this mathematical outlook: Wren is shown not just with the plans of St Paul’s, but with dividers and a copy of Euclid’s Elements. There were site-specific challenges too, like the fact that the cathedral had to be built on soft London clay. A universal power law for modelling the growth and form of teeth, claws, horns, thorns, beaks, and shells.