The Gift of King Charles III of Spain...

... (to James Harris, later First Earl of Malmesbury)

Juan de Iriarte y Cisneros (1702-1771) was able to complete only one substantial volume of his bibliography of Greek manuscripts in the Spanish Royal Library in Madrid. When curator Bruce Swann decided to transfer the Classics Library’s copy of Regiae bibliothecae Matritensis codices Graeci mss. (Madrid, 1769) to the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, he noticed a Latin inscription on the fly-leaf (see image below).

Translated, the inscription reads:

James Harris
Salisbury, 1771
My son gave this scholarly catalogue of manuscripts to me as a gift upon his return following an absence of three years abroad. Moreover, Charles III, the Catholic king, a noted promoter and patron of the arts and literature, gave it to him while he was employed at the embassy in Madrid in 1771.

James Harris (1709-1780) was an important English scholar and politician, the author of a number of works on grammar, music and criticism, copies of which may be found in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. He was a great acquaintance of Georg Frideric Handel, many of whose operatic manuscripts he came to possess. In 1760 he was elected member of parliament for Christchurch, Hampshire, he later served as a commissioner of the Admiralty and of the Treasury, and from 1774 was the secretary of Queen Charlotte.

                  

One of the younger Harris’s first postings was in Spain, where he was instrumental in averting a war over the Falkland Islands, and where he received this book as a gift from King Charles III. Young Harris recorded the following impressions of the Spanish monarch:

“He has a most clear head, comprehends with great alacrity, and answers with unparalleled accuracy. His heart, also, is excellent; the best of fathers and of masters, and although despotic, yet never a tyrant. … Such are his good qualities; his faults are, a false idea of the glory and power of his monarchy; a temper, when once irritated, irreconcileable; a bland submission to whatever happens, which, whether it is to himself or others, he calls the will of Providence; and such a determined attachment to his favourite amusement, the chace [i.e., hunting], as to make him slothful and negligent in his more important avocations” (Diaries and correspondence of James Harris, first Earl of Malmesbury. London, 1844, I, 50-51)

The younger Harris could be sure his father would be interested in this sumptuous catalog of Greek manuscripts. While in Spain, he also helped further his father’s researches in other ways:

“It having often been asserted, that an entire and complete copy of Livy was extant in the Escurial library, I requested my son in the year 1771, (he being at that timeminister plenipotentiary to the court of Madrid,) to inquire for me, what manuscripts of that author were there to be found” (The works of James Harris, Esq. London, 1841, p. 544).

Regiae bibliothecae Matritensis codices Graeci mss. (Q.A.481.75 M26r) may now be consulted in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

First use of π as 3,14... (18th C)

 

Humans have long known that a special relationship exists between the diameter and circumference of a circle. As early as 2000 BCE, some had even found numbers to represent this relationship. By this date, the Babylonians knew that the circumference of a circle was always approximately 3 1/8 times larger than its diameter, while the Egyptians put the value at 4(8/9)2

Hindu astronomy books known as the Siddhantas tell us that by 380 CE the Hindus had arrived at 3 177/1250, or 3.1416, as a constant value for the circumference/diameter ratio, and in the fifth century CE Chinese mathematicians determined that the constant must be greater than 3.1415926 and less than 3.1415927. 

The Mayas likely also knew of this ratio, and, given their sophisticated methods of calculation, had probably determined its value with a high degree of accuracy. However, it may be impossible to know for certain, as Diego de Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, burned most of the Mayas’ written records in the 1560s, believing that they were filled with “‘superstition and lies of the devil’.

Although knowledge of the constant ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter—the ratio we now call “pi”—is ancient, the use of the Greek letter “π” to represent it is not. Use of the π symbol is usually dated to William Jones’ work Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos: or, a New Introduction to the Mathematics, published in 1706 and shown above (direct link to the book in that amazing resource called archive.org)

After spending some time in the Royal Navy as the mathematics master on a man-of-war, Jones worked as an itinerant teacher and then private tutor in London, and later edited and published editions of several of Isaac Newton’s works. His Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos consists of two major sections, the first dealing with “Numeral and Literal Arithmetick” and the second with the “Principles of Geometry.” 

Jones uses the π symbol several times throughout the second part, in both diagrams and equations. Although Jones is generally credited as the first to clearly set the letter π equal to the value 3.14 . . ., he may actually have borrowed this use of the π symbol from the writings of the astronomer John Machin, who had calculated π out to one hundred decimal places, and whose work Jones cites elsewhere in his Synopsis. Regardless of which man used the π symbol first, mathematicians adopted the symbol as standard only after the noted mathematician Euler used it in his writings, approximately thirty years after the publication of Jones’ work.

William Jones, Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos: or, a New Introduction to the Mathematics. London: Printed by J. Matthews for J. Wale, 1706.

X 510 J72S 

Selected Bibliography & Other sources

Arndt, Jörg, and Christoph Haenel. Pi –Unleashed. Trans. Catriona Lischka and David Lischka. Berlin: Springer, 2000. Print.

Beckmann, Petr. A History of Pi. 2nd ed. Boulder: Golem, 1971. Print. (Basically all historical references I mention on this post about the "PI" number for Babilonians, Hindus, Mayas, etc are deep/well explained on this book). Also available at amazon, see link here to buy for less than 15 USD

As usual, wikipedia for William Jones BIO; archive.org (this time the book is not high res and only B/W no color but...)