ILHS Speaker Series – Claire Moriarty

 DATE CHANGED FROM OCTOBER 25

This month at the Irish Literary and Historical Society’s monthly speaker series, Clare Moriarty will speak about “Berkeley’s Marvelous Mathematics”. George Berkeley is undoubtedly Ireland’s most celebrated philosopher, but his role in the history of mathematics is less renowned. In a heated debate between the British and Continental academies over who truly invented calculus (between Newton and Leibniz), Berkeley’s contribution was to publicly scorn the intelligibility of the theory. The speaker’s interest is in Berkeley’s unusual motivation in these attacks, which seem to be the result of learning that certain mathematicians had been ridiculing religion on the basis of its ‘unintelligible’ ideas. Despite majority agreement that Berkeley’s mathematical criticism was correct, and instrumental in guiding the project of fixing early calculus, the question remains as to whether Berkeley cared more about sticking his finger in people’s eyes than he did about the mathematics. Clare Moriarty is a doctoral candidate at King’s College, London, and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

Saint Francis Room, UICC. Sunday, November 1, UICC at 5pm.