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Carlo, you gave a reply to my question: "what does it matter", which is not shortsighted at all. It was not my intention to criticize the work done by John Hessler, who deserves all our esteem and attention, mine was a general statement. We may use in our historical analysis every tool at our disposal no one is worse or better then others, the problem is to reach a goal. You state that Hessler in the study on the collection of navigational data by Delisle understand and explains us the way of navigation was pursued in XVI-XVII century and find a great affinity between variations of errors and stochastic function. Fine! I will write to John asking him a copy of this (unpublished, I suppose) paper. Thanks for the reply and for the information you gave to all of us. vladimiro Il giorno 22/dic/2010, alle ore 18.15, Carlo Petuchia ha scritto: > This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the > whole list) > o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + > Vladimiro, > I am not here to defend his paper but I think your "what does it matter" > is a bit shortsighted. Hessler in this paper took all of Delisle's notebooks > which have over 10,000 positional measurements and declinations from old > ships log books that Delisle compiled throughout his life from voyages of the > 16th and 17th centuries...these notebooks are in the National Archives of > France in Paris and have never been published. Hessler made a huge database > of these and then showed that these directions and declinations can be > modeled using stochastic Brownian bridges and from that he calculated the > incremental positional error of each of the legs of the various transatlantic > voyages and showed how the error fit the profile of stochastic functions > quite closely...this gives a real estimate of the actual error of early > transatlantic voyages and shows the stochastic and truely random nature of > early navigation...and I believe for first time shows that early navigational > errors are not systematic....and besides, the mathematics he used was very > elegant and you never know what you will get until you try... > > Next year Hessler is a Distingushed Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at NIST > and will giving the same lecture on February 11th using updates in his > database and a better Brownian model....you should go... > > Carlo Petuchia > Visiting Professor of Applied Mathematics > Courant Institute, NYU > > > On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Vladimiro Valerio <vladi...@iuav.it> wrote: > This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the > whole list) > o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + > . . . me too, Ed! > There are a lot of questions we don't realize in some modern mathematical > (computational, would be better) approach to history of cartography. The > basic question is always the same: "what does it matter?" > vladimiro _______________________________________________ MapHist: E-mail discussion group on the history of cartography hosted by the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. List Information: http://www.maphist.nl Maphist mailing list Maphist@geo.uu.nl http://mailman.geo.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/maphist
