Morris Kline 2.7

The Renaissance

Trade with the Arabs increasingly spread among the Europeans, as the crusades and other cruises sailed over and invaded their land. The Arabs were able to introduce bare fragments of the Greek’s work into the European mind. These ideas excited the Europeans and they set about translating these fragments into Latin.

In the 15th century when the Turks invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, and Greek scholars fled towards Europe with precious manuscripts and information. Thus began the rapid growth of subjects such as Euclidean Geometry, Hipparchus and Ptolemy’s Trigonometry, Arithmetic, and other sciences amongst the Europeans.

The first major European development occurred when artists began to paint reality as they actually perceived it instead of interpreting religious themes in symbolic styles. This lead to the discovery of projective geometry.

About this time, Nicholas Copernicus announced his research about the heliocentric rotation of the planets. This great discovery shuddered a great wave of curiosity between religious, philosophical, and scientific studies. Later this theory was improved upon by Kepler.

A lot of new discoveries followed soon after. The discovery of Gunpowder, Cannonballs, and Compasses improved greatly upon war and navigation. One result of this was the discovery of America and the flow of new and different ideas into the European culture.

The invention of the printing press was life-changing for these people. Soon they started printing books in large quantities and selling them at cheap prices, thus spreading precious knowledge among ordinary men.