Talk:Isaac Beeckman

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circular velocity is conserved

Does the circular velocity here, refer to the property of an object with a rotational/angular velocity or to the property of an object in orbit? Rotational/Angular velocity is indeed conserved. The velocity of an object in orbit is conserved, but naturally this is thought to be a linear velocity under the influence of gravitational attraction from secondary body. --Firefly322 (talk) 10:40, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Meeting with Descartes

The Statement that the story that Beeckman and Descartes met debating a public mathematical contest on a marketplace “is probably apocryphal” seems to be much too strong (except that the reference to “debating” may have been introduced by the Wikipedia editor, as it is not in the cited source). Cook, in the source cited, casts doubt on the story, but gives absolutely no reason for doing so, and I have never heard of any alternative account of how they met. The truth of the story may not be definitively established, but it is not inherently implausible, and there seems to be little if any positive reason to doubt it. It first appears, in fact, in the first comprehensive biography of Descartes, published by Baillet in 1691. Baillet may not have been 100% reliable on all points, but he apparently had access to many sources about Descartes life that have since been lost, and appears to have made some effort at accuracy. The work is not a popularizing hagiography. All subsequent biographers have, of necessity, relied quite heavily, though not necessarily uncritically, on Baillet (because primary sources about Descartes’ life are thin on the ground and meager in content). Gaukroger, in his very scholarly, detailed, and careful Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995 - more recent than the Cook article), questions some of Baillet’s claims, but gives full credence to the story of Descartes’ meeting with Beeckman in the Breda marketplace. I have rewritten the passage based on Gaukroger’s account of the incident. Treharne (talk) 07:16, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Threaty publisher posthumous

Mathematico-physicarum meditationum, quaestionum, solutionum centuria. Trajecti ad Rhenum: Petrum Danielis Sloot. 1644. OCLC 66169189 – via objects.library.uu.nl. {{cite book}}: External link in |via= (help) is a threaty published posthumous in 1644. Its attribution has been sourced by two secondary sources, but it may need of additional studies. Regards, Theologian81sp