A Global History of Eclipse Reckoning (A Mathematics for Humanity Workshop)

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A Global History of Eclipse Reckoning (A Mathematics for Humanity Workshop)

 18 - 22 Nov 2024

ICMS, Bayes Centre, Edinburgh

 Enquiries

Scientific Organisers:

  • Deborah Kent, University of St Andrews
  • Clemency Montelle, University of Canterbury
  • Ana Simões, CIUHCT, FCUL, University of Lisbon

About:

Some of the earliest mathematical rumination concerns mapping and modelling the periodicities of celestial phenomena. One particularly striking recurring astronomical event is the dramatic celestial occurrence of a lunar or solar eclipse. These events inspired early thinkers to develop and refine techniques and procedures to predict these phenomena and account for their features. Yet, despite the widespread continuity of the endeavour of eclipse reckoning and the mathematical practices that underpin it, typical narratives of its technical history nonetheless tend to be very geographically confined and dominated by sources and voices carrying the interests of specific regions subject to the influence of particular contemporary forces. Existing scholarship invites further work that can encompass a unity of approach alongside distinctiveness. This enterprise requires a wide range of mathematical, technical, cultural, and historical expertise to uncover commonalities and circulation in all directions. 

The objective of this 5-day workshop is to bring scholars from distinct cultures of inquiry together to share the specific ways in which people in different times and places developed mathematics to model eclipse phenomena, with a chronological focus on the period 1650-1922, and to trace the circulation and development of these technical insights and practices globally. The workshop will include academic papers from a range of both established and early-career researchers alongside workshops designed to connect participants with eclipse-related methods and physical processes of mathematical knowledge-making, as well as to consider different forms of research output related to eclipse research and how this changed over the period under investigation and continues to develop. The aim is to bring together a cross-cultural cohort of scholars with the vision of generating a broader, coherent sense of shared ownership of the mathematical tradition of eclipse reckoning.

Participation:

Applications to attend this workshop closed Friday 13 September, 15.00 BST. Application outcomes were sent Wednesday 25 September. If you have not received an email from ICMS, please check your junk/spam inbox or get in touch.

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Public Lecture:

Ana Matilde Sousa will deliver the public lecture, Einstein, Eddington and the Eclipse. Travel impressions, on Tuesday 19 November form 18.00. The lecture will be held in G.03 on the ground floor of the Bayes Centre. For further details and to reserve a seat, please click here.

Workshop participants - a seat will be automatically reserved for you. You do not need to register for this lecture.

Programme:

MONDAY 18 NOVEMBER EXPEDITIONS AND EMPIRES
09.00 – 09.30 Registration and Refreshments
09.30 - 09.40 Welcome and Housekeeping
09.40 - 10.30 Ana Simões, CIUHCT, FCUL, University of Lisbon Towards a global history of the 1919 total solar eclipse
10.30 - 11.15 E3 team An eclipse on paper
11.15 - 11.45 Refreshments
11.45 - 12.15 Joel Beckles, University of St Andrews Contributions Eclipsed by History: The British Eclipse Expeditions of 1889
12.15 - 12.45 Yansong Li, University of St Andrews “Responsibility for this falls only on us”: Chinese observations of the 1941 total solar eclipse
12.45 - 14.15 Lunch
14.15 - 15.00 Deborah Kent, University of St Andrews Towards a global history of the 1860 eclipse
15.00 - 15.45 Daniel Belteki, Science Museum The whip of the Sun: the rhetoric of science and government-funding deployed during the organisation of the British expedition to view the solar eclipse of 1860 in Spain
15.45 - 16.00 Refreshments
16.00 - 16.45 Ileana Chinnici, INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo The 1860 Total Solar Eclipse
16.45 - 18.00 Welcome Reception hosted at ICMS
TUESDAY 19 NOVEMBER OBSERVING AND RECORDING
09.30 - 10.15 Florence Hsia, University of Wisconsin-Madison Reading eclipse reports from the Middle Kingdom
10.15 - 11.00 Jesse Garrison, University College London First British eclipse expeditions
11.00 - 11.30 Refreshments
11.30 - 12.15 Toner Stevenson, The University of Sydney How Einstein’s theory of general relativity was proven in Australia in 1922
12.15 - 13.30 Lunch
13.30 - 14.15 Eun-Joo Ahn, Yale University Daily Solar Observations at Mount Wilson Observatory and Solar Eclipse Expeditions: shaping each other in the early twentieth century
14.15 - 15.00 Megan Briers, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science “The aspect of things was the most fearful that I ever saw”: Emotions and Victorian eclipse observations
15.00 - 15.30 Refreshments
18.00 - 19.30 Public Lecture, by Ana Matilde Sousa Einstein, Eddington and the Eclipse. Travel impressions
WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER MEASUREMENT AND INSTRUMENTATION
09.30 - 10.15 Katharina Bick, Universität Regensburg Numbers and Shapes. Examining photographs of the solar corona at the occasion of the total solar eclipse of 30 Aug 1905
10.15 - 11.00 Matthieu Husson, CNRS Diagrammatic approaches to eclipses in 13th-15th Latin sources (with Clément Cartier, Université Paris Cité)
11.00 - 11.30 Refreshments
11.30 - 12.15 Jambugahapitiye Dhammaloka, University of Peradeniya Śrīpati’s Versified Instructions on the Schematization of Lunar Eclipses
12.15 - 13.00 Clemency Montelle, University of Canterbury The Parvadvayasādhana of Mallāri: A sixteenth-century Sanskrit table text to compute eclipses
13.00 Lunch and Free Afternoon
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER COMPUTATIONAL PROCEDURES AND ALGORITHMS
09.30 - 10.15 Aditya Kolachana, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT–Madras) An overview of the syzygy and lunar eclipse computations in the Uparāgakriyākrama of Acyuta Piṣāraṭi
10.15 - 11.00 Varun Mandadi, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) An Overview of Eclipse Calculation Methods in Tantrasaṅgraha of Nīlakaṇṭha Somayājī
11.00 - 11.30 Refreshments
11.30 - 12.15 Michael Zeiler, EclipseAtlas.com The integration of spatial and temporal information in historical eclipse maps
12.15 - 13.00 Dan McGlaun, Eclipse2024.org A tour of the modern history of eclipse calculations, including the current state of the art and a look ahead to future developments.
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 14.45 David Aubin, Sorbonne University Emmanuel Liais, Jules Janssen, Camille Flammarion and the popularization of eclipses in 19th-century France
14.45 - 17.00 Collaboration Time HoST co-authors (refreshments available)
19.00 - 22.00 Workshop Dinner
FRIDAY 22 NOVEMBER RESEARCH OUTPUTS AND OUTREACH
09.30 - 10.00 Emma Baxter, University of Oxford ‘From the hand of a lady’: Code-Switching in Agnes Clerke’s Astronomy Publications
10.00 - 10.45 Hugh Hudson, University of Glasgow Solar Oblateness and SunSketcher
10.45 - 11.15 Refreshments
11.15 - 13.00 E3 Workshop Outreach and how to do it
13.00 Lunch and End of Workshop HoST workshops as applicable