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Oppose Marginal, but this thing has a cultural significance within the popular history UK schools akin to satchels and lunchboxes. I'd like to see historical coverage of it expanded. Have the included instruments changed?
Well, perhaps we should refactor "mathematical instruments" to take out the whole text of the Oxford set description and refer to it as an example of educational sets of mathematical instruments. But then this article has virtually no content and I'm nt going to research 5000 years of math history. --Wtshymanski (talk) 13:13, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Mathematical instrument is a huge topic and should be on the GA, FA & VA lists for maths & sciences. What we have here is so tiny that I suspect there's also Mathematical instrument (the real article) out there somewhere under some name I can't quite think of.
As the content currently is, I see your point about merging the Oxford set to here, because there's nothing else in the article. However the Oxford set article should stand up on its own and Mathematical instrument should be far bigger than it currently is. That merge would be such a short-termist view as to be inappropriate.
I had a look around yesterday and if there's a more comprehensive article, it doesn't seem to use the phrase "mathematical instrument" in its text. What would the scope logically be? Devices only used for doing mathematics, or instruments that exemplify some mathematical principle? For example, is a sextant a mathematical instrument for the purposes of this article? The latter category would be more inclusive but hard to defince crisply, since everything has math in it. --Wtshymanski (talk) 13:49, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Google Books has found some relevant things to read first, like "A Treatise on Mathematical Instruments" [1] - if sources talk about it under that title, it gets in. --Wtshymanski (talk) 13:52, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I can think of two museums of the History of Science (Oxford and Florence) whose artefact collections are almost entirely of mathematical and scientific instruments. Both also include a remarkable number of astrolabes, which of course led in time to the various sextants. The distinction was usually that a mathematical instrument was calibrated with regular graduations, either in length or angles - a technically difficult problem that was first a guild secret and route to a career doing just that, later a cause for the invention of the ruling engine and dividing engines. It was more about who knew the secret of making them, then their function or operating principle. James Watt was one of the more famous 18th & 19th century engineers who began by training as such an instrument maker. Simple instruments, like dividers, were considered as mathematical because of long history and what they were used for. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:02, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
