Lucio Russo
Italian mathematician and historian of science, author of The Forgotten Revolution, known for work on Hellenistic science and ancient mathematics.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
-
1. The Forgotten Revolution
How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had To Be Reborn
The book argues that a genuine scientific revolution occurred in the Hellenistic world around 300 BC—centered in places like Alexandria—where mathematicians and engineers developed rigorous geometry, quantitative physics and experimental practices, as seen in the work of Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus and Eratosthenes. It claims many of these achievements (heliocentric ideas, measurement of Earth’s circumference, systematic mechanics) were later lost or marginalized by political and cultural upheavals, so that the early modern Scientific Revolution was in large part a recovery and reinvention of an earlier tradition. The author traces how Hellenistic science was transmitted, transformed and disrupted through the Roman period, late antiquity and the Islamic world, and challenges the standard narrative that modern science originated solely in early modern Europe.
Purchase from Bookshop.org