Metallurgy, Ballistics and Epistemic Instruments - The Nova scientia of Nicolo Tartaglia. A New Edition.

In 1537, Nicolò Tartaglia (1500 1557), a mathematician from Brescia, published Nova scientia. It was this work that led to the foundation of the modern science of ballistics. Tartaglia s intention was to create a purely mathematical science based on axioms, which was fundamental to the entire subject of mechanics, starting with a limited number of principles and arriving at a series of propositions through a rigid procedure of deduction. Nevertheless, as Tartaglia himself states, his motive was fundamentally practical and connected to the activities of the sixteenth-century bombardier. A new edition of Nicolò Tartaglia s Nova scientia, based on the 1558 print run of the second enlarged edition (1550), shows how the emergence of theoretical ballistics was a consequence of the technological innovations that took place in the frame of the practice of iron casting at the turn from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century. Sources of the Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge is a series presenting historical documents in a new format which combines the advantages of traditional printed books with those of the digital medium. In each volume a source text relevant for the history of knowledge is reproduced, typically in facsimile, together with an introduction and commentaries reflecting original scholarly work. The volumes are available both as print-on-demand books and as open-access publications on the Internet. The material is freely accessible online at www. edition-open-access.de, supplemented by additional information and interactive features. The original works reproduced in this series are typically rare books or manuscripts that are not readily accessible in libraries.