Hobbes intended and expected De Corpore to secure his place among the foremost mathematicians of his era. This is evident from the content of Part III of the work, which contains putative solutions to the most eagerly sought mathematical results of the seventeenth century. It is well known that Hobbes failed abysmally in his attempts to solve problems of this sort, but it is not generally understood that the mathematics of De Corpore is closely connected with the work of some of seventeenth-century Europe’s most important mathematicians. This paper investigates the connection between the main mathematical chapters of De Corpore and the work of Galileo Galilei, Bonaventura Cavalieri, and Gilles Personne de Roberval. I show that Hobbes’s approach in Chapter 16 borrows heavily from Galileo’s Two New Sciences, while his treatment of “deficient figures’ in Chapter 17 is nearly identical in method to Cavalieri’s Exercitationes Geometricae Sex. Further, I argue that Hobbes’s attempt to determine the arc length of the parabola in Chapter 18 is intended to use Roberval’s methods to generate a more general result than one that Roberval himself had achieved in the 1640s (when he and Hobbes were both active in the circle of mathematicians around Marin Mersenne). I claim Hobbes was convinced that his first principles had led him to discover a “method of motion” that he mistakenly thought could solve any geometric problem with elementary constructions.

中文翻译：

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霍布斯关于运动和幅度的比率

霍布斯打算并期望德科波雷在他那个时代最重要的数学家中占据一席之地。这从工作的第三部分的内容中可以明显看出，其中包含对 17 世纪最热切寻求的数学结果的推定解决方案。众所周知，霍布斯在试图解决这类问题时失败了，但人们普遍不理解，De Corpore 的数学与 17 世纪欧洲一些最重要的数学家的工作密切相关。本文研究了《身体论》的主要数学章节与 Galileo Galilei、Bonaventura Cavalieri 和 Gilles Personne de Roberval 的工作之间的联系。我表明霍布斯在第 16 章中的方法大量借用了伽利略的两种新科学，而他在第 17 章中对“缺陷图形”的处理方法与卡瓦列里的 Exercitationes Geometricae Sex 的方法几乎相同。此外，我认为霍布斯在第 18 章中试图确定抛物线的弧长是为了使用罗伯瓦尔的方法来产生一个比罗伯瓦尔本人在 1640 年代（当时他和霍布斯都活跃于Marin Mersenne 周围的数学家圈子）。我声称霍布斯确信他的第一原理使他发现了一种“运动方法”，他错误地认为这种方法可以用基本结构解决任何几何问题。我认为霍布斯在第 18 章中试图确定抛物线的弧长是为了使用罗伯瓦尔的方法来产生一个比罗伯瓦尔本人在 1640 年代（当时他和霍布斯都活跃在Marin Mersenne 周围的数学家）。我声称霍布斯确信他的第一原理使他发现了一种“运动方法”，他错误地认为这种方法可以用基本结构解决任何几何问题。我认为霍布斯在第 18 章中试图确定抛物线的弧长是为了使用罗伯瓦尔的方法来产生一个比罗伯瓦尔本人在 1640 年代（当时他和霍布斯都活跃在Marin Mersenne 周围的数学家）。我声称霍布斯确信他的第一原理使他发现了一种“运动方法”，他错误地认为这种方法可以用基本结构解决任何几何问题。