Thomas Bradwardine

Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1300 – 26 August 1349) was an English cleric, scholar, mathematician, physicist, courtier and, very briefly, Archbishop of Canterbury.

It is rumoured that this move to Durham helped put him into contact with King Edward III, which would lead to his eventual appointment of Chaplain of Old St Paul's Cathedral in London.

[4] Bradwardine was a precocious student, educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a fellow by 1321; he took the degree of doctor of divinity, and acquired the reputation of a profound scholar, a skilful mathematician and an able theologian.

Bradwardine (like his contemporary William of Ockham) was a culminating figure of the great intellectual movement at Oxford that had begun in the 1240s.

Bradwardine was an ordinary secular cleric, which gave him intellectual freedom but deprived him of the security and wherewithal that the Preaching Orders would have afforded; instead he turned to royal patronage.

From being chancellor of the diocese of London as Dean of St Paul's, he became chaplain and confessor to Edward III, whom he attended during his wars in France at the Battle of Crécy, where he preached at the victory Mass, and at the subsequent siege of Calais.

This astrophysical treatise was not published until it was edited by Sir Henry Savile and printed in London, 1618; its circulation in manuscript was very limited.

The implications of the infinite void were revolutionary; to have pursued them would have threatened the singular relationship of man and this natural world to God (Cantor 2001); in it he treated theology mathematically.

[9] Merton College sheltered a group of dons devoted to natural science, mainly physics, astronomy and mathematics, rivals of the intellectuals at the University of Paris.

Bradwardine was one of these Oxford Calculators, studying mechanics with William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, and John Dumbleton.

Almost immediately, Giovanni di Casale and Nicole Oresme found how to represent the results by geometrical graphs, introducing the connection between geometry and the physical world that became a second characteristic habit of Western thought ...In Tractatus de proportionibus (1328), Bradwardine extended the theory of proportions of Eudoxus of Cnidus to anticipate the concept of exponential growth, later developed by the Bernoulli and Euler, with compound interest as a special case.

Mathematician and mathematical historian Carl Benjamin Boyer writes, "Bradwardine developed the Boethian theory of double or triple or, more generally, what we would call 'n-tuple' proportion".

[13] Bradwardine rejected four opinions concerning the link between power, resistance, and speed on the basis that were inconsistent with Aristotle's or because they did not align with what could be easily observed regarding motion.

"[15] Aristotle's calculation of average speed was criticized by Bradwardine for not examining "the whole question of how moment-to-moment velocities are related within the whole time of the movement.

[17] Gerard of Cremona's Latin translation of Quia primos (or De Gradibus) would have been available to Bradwardine, but Roger Bacon seemed to be the only European philosopher to have had a direct connection to the book, but not to the degree of Arnald of Villanova.

[20] She states, "Bradwardine's art is notable for its detailed description of several techniques for fixing and recalling specific material through the use of graphically detailed, brilliantly colored, and vigorously animated mental images, grouped together in a succession of pictures or organized scenes, whose internal order recalls not just particular content but the relationship among its parts.

"[20] She acknowledges this being similar to active imaging described by Cicero, along with the memory devices for things and words being changed in rhetoric, but are distinct since the imagery Bradwardine uses is decidedly medieval in nature.

[20] Bradwardine's theories on the insolubilia including the liar paradox were a great influence on the work of Jean Buridan.

Geometria speculativa , 1495