Scientific Organisers:
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Deborah Kent, University of St Andrews
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Clemency Montelle, University of Canterbury
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Ana Simões, CIUHCT, FCUL, University of Lisbon
About:
Some of the earliest mathematical rumination concerns mapping and modelling the periodicities of celestial phenomena. One particularly striking recurring astronomical event is the dramatic celestial occurrence of a lunar or solar eclipse. These events inspired early thinkers to develop and refine techniques and procedures to predict these phenomena and account for their features. Yet, despite the widespread continuity of the endeavour of eclipse reckoning and the mathematical practices that underpin it, typical narratives of its technical history nonetheless tend to be very geographically confined and dominated by sources and voices carrying the interests of specific regions subject to the influence of particular contemporary forces. Existing scholarship invites further work that can encompass a unity of approach alongside distinctiveness. This enterprise requires a wide range of mathematical, technical, cultural, and historical expertise to uncover commonalities and circulation in all directions.
The objective of this 5-day workshop was to bring scholars from distinct cultures of inquiry together to share the specific ways in which people in different times and places developed mathematics to model eclipse phenomena, with a chronological focus on the period 1650-1922, and to trace the circulation and development of these technical insights and practices globally. The workshop included academic papers from a range of both established and early-career researchers alongside workshops designed to connect participants with eclipse-related methods and physical processes of mathematical knowledge-making, as well as to consider different forms of research output related to eclipse research and how this changed over the period under investigation and continues to develop. The aim was to bring together a cross-cultural cohort of scholars with the vision of generating a broader, coherent sense of shared ownership of the mathematical tradition of eclipse reckoning.
Public Lecture:
Ana Matilde Sousa delivered the public lecture, Einstein, Eddington and the Eclipse. Travel impressions. For further details, please click here.
Programme:
| MONDAY 18 NOVEMBER | EXPEDITIONS AND EMPIRES | |
| Registration and Refreshments | ||
| Welcome and Housekeeping | ||
| Ana Simões, CIUHCT, FCUL, University of Lisbon | Towards a global history of the 1919 total solar eclipse |
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| E3 team | An eclipse on paper | |
| Refreshments | ||
| Joel Beckles, University of St Andrews | Contributions Eclipsed by History: The British Eclipse Expeditions of 1889 | |
| Yansong Li, University of St Andrews | “Responsibility for this falls only on us”: Chinese observations of the 1941 total solar eclipse |
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| Lunch | ||
| Deborah Kent, University of St Andrews | Towards a global history of the 1860 total solar eclipse |
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| Daniel Belteki, Science Museum | The whip of the Sun: the rhetoric of science and government-funding deployed during the organisation of the British expedition to view the solar eclipse of 1860 in Spain | |
| Refreshments | ||
| Ileana Chinnici, INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo | The 1860 Total Solar Eclipse | |
| Welcome Reception | hosted at ICMS | |
| TUESDAY 19 NOVEMBER | OBSERVING AND RECORDING | |
| Florence Hsia, University of Wisconsin-Madison | Reading eclipse reports from the Middle Kingdom | |
| Jesse Garrison, University College London | First British eclipse expeditions | |
| Refreshments | ||
| Toner Stevenson, The University of Sydney | How Einstein’s theory of general relativity was proven in Australia in 1922 | |
| Lunch | ||
| Eun-Joo Ahn, Yale University | Daily Solar Observations at Mount Wilson Observatory and Solar Eclipse Expeditions: shaping each other in the early twentieth century | |
| Megan Briers, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science | “The aspect of things was the most fearful that I ever saw”: Emotions and Victorian eclipse observations | |
| Refreshments | ||
| Hugh Hudson, University of Glasgow | Solar Oblateness and SunSketcher | |
| Public Lecture, by Ana Matilde Sousa | Einstein, Eddington and the Eclipse. Travel impressions | |
| WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER | MEASUREMENT AND INSTRUMENTATION | |
| Katharina Bick, Universität Regensburg | Numbers and Shapes. Examining photographs of the solar corona at the occasion of the total solar eclipse of 30 Aug 1905 | |
| Matthieu Husson, CNRS | Diagrammatic approaches to eclipses in 13th-15th Latin sources (with Clément Cartier, Université Paris Cité) | |
| Refreshments | ||
| Clemency Montelle, University of Canterbury | The Parvadvayasādhana of Mallāri: A sixteenth-century Sanskrit table text to compute eclipses | |
| Lunch and Free Afternoon | See organisers for details of the following tours - Royal Observatory Edinburgh - 13.00 & National Museum of Scotland - 15.00 | |
| THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER | COMPUTATIONAL PROCEDURES AND ALGORITHMS | |
| Aditya Kolachana, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT–Madras) | An overview of the syzygy and lunar eclipse computations in the Uparāgakriyākrama of Acyuta Piṣāraṭi | |
| Varun Mandadi, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) | An Overview of Eclipse Calculation Methods in Tantrasaṅgraha of Nīlakaṇṭha Somayājī |
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| Refreshments | ||
| Michael Zeiler, EclipseAtlas.com | The integration of spatial and temporal information in historical eclipse maps | |
| Dan McGlaun, Eclipse2024.org | A tour of the modern history of eclipse calculations, including the current state of the art and a look ahead to future developments. | |
| Lunch | ||
| David Aubin, Sorbonne University | Emmanuel Liais, Jules Janssen, Camille Flammarion and the popularization of eclipses in 19th-century France | |
| Collaboration Time | HoST co-authors (refreshments available) | |
| Workshop Dinner, hosted at The Brasserie | The Scholar, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5AY | |
| FRIDAY 22 NOVEMBER | RESEARCH OUTPUTS AND OUTREACH | |
| Emma Baxter, University of Oxford | ‘From the hand of a lady’: Code-Switching in Agnes Clerke’s Astronomy Publications | |
| Jambugahapitiye Dhammaloka, University of Peradeniya | Śrīpati’s Versified Instructions on the Schematization of Lunar Eclipses | |
| Refreshments | ||
| E3 Workshop | Outreach and how to do it | |
| Lunch and End of Workshop | HoST workshops as applicable |