Historical Math and Science Blog

Anyone working on translations and old math and science works will be familiar with spending hours typing up old documents, even if they're in readable scans that OCR should, in principle, be able to handle. The problem is of course the math and tables. Typing up the equations in LaTeX is a major hurdle, even if you use a snippets-based approach like Gilles Castille . I personally use Obsidian as a note-taking app, and the LaTeX Suite plugin, with some minor tweaks to the shortcuts, and I'm quite fast at this point. But seeing a dense page of multi-line equations (e.g. by Gauss) still makes me tense up a bit. Transcribing one page is no trouble, but 60 pages turns into a multi-week endeavor, and I'm limited by an issue with my ulnar nerves that makes typing for longer than 30 minutes quite painful. Needless to say, transcribing is a burden that I would very much like to lessen.  Now I think I've cracked it, thanks to olmOCR . I tried it out on their web demo , and it se...

 I came across this paper by Leibniz a couple years ago while researching the experiments of Francis Hauksbee for my YouTube series on the Experimental History of Electricity . My Latin wasn't quite good enough to read the paper fluently, so I came back to it now and again to work through it once more, and judge my progress. The last hurdle was translating Leibniz's poem on phosphorus, an excerpt from a longer epicedium  (Latin mourning poem) for Duke Johannus Friderick. You can actually find my questions on both the prose and the poetry on sites like History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange, and the Latin subreddit. I'm very grateful for everyone's help and input. This translation was also notable for being the first where I turned to ChatGPT for helping to understand allusions, parse tricky Latin passages, and review my translations for errors. It rarely provided complete accuracy, but it was enough to get me unstuck, or correct misunderstandings I had. None ...