Pen to Print in 18th-Century Mathematics: Boscovich Uses the Page

Roger Boscovich’s career traversed much of Europe; his work, topics from astronomy to geodesy, optics to mechanics, mathematics to natural philosophy. When he put pen to paper, Boscovich deployed writing practices with a long history, from consistent partitions of the page and organizational schemes of sections and paragraphs to carefully drafted diagrams and layers of changes in the margins. One of those authors who (in Karine Chemla’s words) “design their texts at the same time they design concepts and results,” Boscovich mixed an older language of proportions with algebraic expressions in multiple variables, subjected both numerical data and mathematical relationships to tabular organization, narrated algebraic transformations in prose, and told readers what to see in his diagrams. His pen was much in action in his drafts; and his papers bear those traces. Fair copies produced by others helped to reconfigure his intentions; typesetters then invoked typographic conventions. In Boscovich’s body of work we can thus trace the fluidity of pen strokes and fixity of print in constructing the page and modeling mathematical thinking.