Abstract

This paper is an essay-review of J. Yoder's "Unrolling Time: Christian Huygens and the Mathematization of Nature" (Cambridge, 1989). Highlighting the scholarly thoroughness and mathematical competence of Yoder's reconstruction of Huygens's heuristic path to his ground-breaking results on centrifugal force, cycloidal motion and evolutes, the essay also deals with Yoder's attempts to characterize Huygens's way of using mathematics in physical problems. In opposition to Yoder's thesis, this paper argues that evidence internal to Huygens's work as well as the contemporary reaction to it suggest the existence of substantial methodological differences between Huygens's mathematization of nature and Newton's