(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

This week EMLO has published an inventory of the surviving letters of Pietro Mengoli (1625–1686), the Italian mathematician who — through his use of algebraic methods to develop further the indivisible method pioneered by his teacher Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598-1647) — made significant contributions to contemporary work on quadratures in the second half of the seventeenth century. Mengoli’s correspondence was published in an immaculate volume (edited by G. Baroncini and M. Cavazza, 1986) by the esteemed publishing house Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki, and the inventory  was compiled from this edition by a former EMLO intern, Dr Francesca Giuliano, who was in Oxford while working on her doctoral dissertation on Thomas Hobbes.

In the coming weeks and months, keep an eye on EMLO’s cluster of mathematicians as some fascinating correspondences are due to enter the union catalogue and intriguing conversations taking place within these letters will rise to the fore.