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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2013

Measurement and the price of wood in France around 1800

Résumé

The scholarly books of mathematics from the 18th and 19th centuries, those on which historians of mathematics have so far focused primarily, reflect only partially the computation practices that were in use in various professional milieus. Centered on the benefits of decimal fractions and logarithms, these books certainly fitted the needs of professional mathematicians and astronomers, but certainly not those of bankers, merchants, artisans, workers and peasants. Today everyone uses the decimal system, has received basic education in mathematics and owns an electronic calculator, so it has become almost impossible to perceive the difficulty of calculations underlying the daily transactions of the 18th century. The numerous non-decimal measurement units specific to each country, each region or each city, led constantly to tedious problems, simultaneously requiring measure conversions and currency conversions, and also to highly technical operations. In addition, practices of counting and measurement could vary according to the professions, especially according to whether they needed exact results or just more or less crude approximations. This situation resulted in a multiplication of books of "comptes faits" – as they were called in France – with a general or specialized scope, as well as of many numerical and graphical tables to facilitate daily calculations. These works regularly define mathematics as composed of arithmetic, i.e., measurement of discrete quantities, and geometry, i.e., measurement of continuous quantities. This view of mathematics as entirely organized around the concept of measurement and its applications in everyday life deserves attention. The usual distinction between abstract numbers and measured numbers is magnified here by the omnipresence of 'complex numbers', that is to say numbers that express at the same time several kinds of units depending in a non uniform fashion on each other. Also observed in these books is a constant interaction between different mathematical objects in a process of mutual reinforcement and popularization: whole numbers, fractions, decimal fractions, logarithms, linear scales, tables, charts. We finally meet there an ongoing effort to ensure that the concepts and basic operations of calculation become accessible to a large audience who did not receive a high level of mathematical education or received no education at all. After a brief general overview, these issues will be illustrated by a case study on the measurement of wood and the calculation of its price in France around the year 1800, certainly an important and significant problem if one believes the many specialized books which were published at the time on this peculiar subject. We will try to identify the different groups of actors involved in the production and trade of wood, their practices and instruments of measurement and calculation, and their specific mathematical knowledge.
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hal-01495926 , version 1 (27-03-2017)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01495926 , version 1

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Dominique Tournès. Measurement and the price of wood in France around 1800. 24th International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Jul 2013, Manchester, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-01495926⟩
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