Expanding Horizons

This article reassesses the significance of the creation of the professorship of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in 1620. The establishment of this professorship has been largely overlooked in scholarship on the development of institutional mathematics in Britain. The essay shows that a group of educationalists were responsible for fashioning the Edinburgh professorship in response to very specific challenges that arose from philosophical and intellectual developments in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Employing a mix of biographical, textual, and subject-specific analyses, the article examines evidence that reveals that this group represented an interconnected community of cosmopolitan academics whose congregation in Edinburgh resulted in the importation and development of new scientific and philosophical ideas from across Europe. It describes their educational backgrounds and examines them in the context of both the local and supra-regional responses to the various crises of confidence in the then-standard cosmological model. Cross-referencing between their writings/personal backgrounds and the relevant contemporary sources from the university reveals how the process informed and determined the nature and significance of this specific role.