MDMD(7) Ruggiero

[Doug Millison]

At 12:12 PM 8/29/97, andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk wrote:
>223.2 `mio caro Ruggiero' Ital = my dear Ruggiero (Roger),
>apparently a brother Jesuit (223.14) who is interested in
>surveying. any details?

Ruggiero seems to refer back to Fr. Boscovich, whose Christian name is,
according to one web reference I found, in fact Roger (another web page
gives his name as "Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich") . In the first reference I
cite below, he's credited with surveying "the meridian of the Papal
states." There's no reference on this Web page to any surveying he sought
to undertake in America (223.14:  "Brother Ruggiero wishes to measure a
Degree, in America."), although the second web page I found says he
traveled to California in 1769 to observe a transit of Venus.

You'll find a brief biographical sketch of Boscovich at
http://204.142.194.96/faculty/jmac/sj/boscovic.htm and links to more
information about Jesuits.  Here's what this page says about Boscovich:

"Two hundred years ago February 13, 1787 the Croatian Jesuit mathematician Roger
Boscovich,S.J. died. He developed the first coherent description of atomic
theory in his work Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis , which is one of the
great attempts to understand the structure of the  universe in a single
idea. He held that bodies could not be composed of continuous matter, but
of countless "point-like structures". In this work he states that the
ultimate elements of matter are indivisible points "atoms", which are
centers of force and this force varies in proportion to distance. What is
remarkable is that his works appeared well over a century before the birth
of modern atomic theory.

"Robert Marsh, the author of Physics and Poets, credits Boscovich with the
idea of a FIELD: Faraday and others took the idea from him. His influence
on modern atomic physics is undoubted. Boscovich was a creative scientist
and his inventions included the ring  micrometer and an achromatic
telescope. He was the first one to apply probability to the theory of
errors. Later mathematicians such as Laplace and Gauss acknowledged their
indebtedness to his pioneering work which led to Legendre's principle of
least squares.

"The 500 dinar Croatian note honors Roger Joseph Boscovich,S.J.
(ILLUSTRATION OF NOTE)

"Well known all over Europe, Boscovich was later made a Fellow of the Royal
Society of London and today the name Boscovich is found on maps of the moon
since a rather large lunar crater was named in his honor. Because of his
prominence as a scholar, it was his influence that minimized the hostility
of Catholic churchmen to the Copernican system.

"Russian scientists have always shown a strong interest in his work and
more recently western scientists have become better acquanted with his
contributions. This resurgence of interest in his works is evident from a
host of recent books and articles. His legacy has been preserved in the
special Boscovich Archives in the Rare Boooks library at the University  of
California in Berkeley. Amoung the 180 items housed there are found not
only many of his 66 scientific treatices, but also correspondence with
other mathematicians such as Euler, D'Lambert, Lagrange, Laplace, Jacobi
and Bernoulli.

"It was assumed then as now that mathematicians have the practical sense to
fix intricate things such as clocks, so he was commissioned by popes and
emperors to repair the alarming fissures in the cupola of the Milan
Cathedral, to reinforce the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica, to direct the
drainage of the Pontine marshes, and to survey the meridian of the Papal
states.

"Born in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia in 1711 Boscovich lived a long fruitful life
and was one of the last renowned polymaths.  Incisive in thought, bold in
spirit, and independent in judgement he was a man of the eighteenth-century
in some respects, but far ahead of his time in others."

http://www.vma.bme.hu/mathhist/Mathematicians/Boscovich.html says he was
born in Ragusa ("the strategic Dalmatian port" mentioned as "Fr.
Boscovich's birthplace" on 223:6):

"Boscovich studied at the Collegium Romanum in Rome and was appointed
professor of mathematics there in 1740. He was one of the first in
continental Europe to accept Newton's gravitational theories and he wrote
70 papers on optics, astronomy, gravitation, meterology and trigonometry.

"His main work was in mathematical physics. In his study of the shape of
the Earth he used the idea of minimising the sum of the absolute values of
the deviations. His solution to this minimising problem took a geometric
form. Boscovich was the first to give a procedure to compute a planet's
orbit from 3 observations of its position and he also gave a procedure for
determining the equator of a planet from 3 observations of a surface
feature.

Boscovich became professor of mathematics at Pavia in 1764 and was director
of Brera Observatory. He led an expedition to California in 1769 to observe
a transit of Venus. From 1773 to 1783 he worked in Paris.

D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
  Today (4 Sep 97) in history:  1682. English astronomer
  Edmund Halley saw the comet that would be named after him.