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Vladimiro,
I am not here to defend his paper but I think your "what does it matter"
is a bit shortsighted. Hessler in this paper took all of Delisle's notebooks
which have over 10,000 positional measurements and declinations from old
ships log books that Delisle compiled throughout his life from voyages
of the 16th and 17th centuries...these notebooks are in the National
Archives of France in Paris and have never been published. Hessler made
a huge database of these and then showed that these directions and
declinations can be modeled using stochastic Brownian bridges and from that
he calculated the incremental positional error of each of the legs of the
various transatlantic voyages and showed how the error fit the profile of
stochastic functions quite closely...this gives a real estimate of the
actual error of early transatlantic voyages and shows the stochastic and
truely random nature of early navigation...and I believe for first time
shows that early navigational errors are not systematic....and besides, the
mathematics he used was very elegant and you never know what you will get
until you try...
Next year Hessler is a Distingushed Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at NIST
and will giving the same lecture on February 11th using updates in his
database and a better Brownian model....you should go...
Carlo Petuchia
Visiting Professor of Applied Mathematics
Courant Institute, NYU
On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Vladimiro Valerio <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to the
> whole list)
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>
> . . . me too, Ed!
> There are a lot of questions we don't realize in some modern mathematical
> (computational, would be better) approach to history of cartography. The
> basic question is always the same: "what does it matter?"
> vladimiro
>
>
> Il giorno 17/dic/2010, alle ore 00.45, Dahl Ed ha scritto:
> > This is a MapHist list message (when you hit 'reply' you're replying to
> the whole list)
> > o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o + o
> +
> >
> > On Dec 16, 2010, at 2:47 PM, Carlo Petuchia wrote:
> > ... I did not realize that the fractal theory of Brownian
> > motion could be applied to some of the navigational
> > directions found in early Portolans so effectively....
> >
> > I'm ashamed to admit that I hadn't realized this either.
> >
> > Ed Dahl, 720, chemin Fogarty, Val-des-Monts (Québec) J8N 7S9, CANADA
> > TEL: (819) 671-9721 FAX: (819) 671-9722
> > [email protected]
> >
> > <clear sailing x.jpg>
> >
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