Abstract

What led Evangelista Torricelli to publish his one and only printed bookBooks in 1644? This article answers that question by situating Torricelli and his work within the social milieu that joined mathematiciansMathematiciansand geometryGeometry with elite status as intellectualsIntellectual in seventeenth-century Europe, showing how bookBookspublicationPublication and authorship did and did not advance those connections. Moving in four parts, it shows first how Galileo was not, as he was in so many other aspects of Torricelli's work, the model for his idea of bookBooks authorship, and then turns instead to several other seventeenth-century examples– Roberval, Huygens[aut]Huygens, Christian, and Newton[aut]Newton, Isaac in particular—as better comparative examples for understanding Torricelli. The article then turns to the precise logics informing Torricelli’s career as a published authorAuthors, setting up his bookBooks as a culminating event in his ascent as the esteemed mathematicianMathematicians in service to the courtCourt of the Medici Grand Duke of TuscanyTuscany. The article concludes by using this frame to read the contents of Torricelli’s opus, namely his puzzling inclusion of 21 different proofsProof of the same proposition already demonstrated by Archimedes[aut]Archimedes.