Izvorni znanstveni članak
MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS IN VARAŽDIN JESUITE COLLEGE
Stanislav Južnič
; Sveučilište u Oklahomi, Norman, OK, SAD
Sažetak
For the first time we provide complete statistics of all professors of physics and
mathematics who were working on other functions in the Jesuit Volloege of Varaždin.
The statistics include information about their birth, ordination, death, studies, work
in Varaždin, mathematical and physical chairs held, missionary work, areas of writing
with sub-fields of physics and mathematics, the number of their works in physicsmathematics,
all preserved works, manuscripts, evaluation of the relevance of their
work, and area of operation compared to the mainstream of the then physics-mathematics
of Ch. Clavius to Bošković. The relevancy is evaluated by the number and
quality of written works, professorial functions, eventual noble birth, high dignities,
and missionary work in distant lands. The area of work of particular Jesuit has been
allocated to the area of work of professor who headed his eventual mathematical specialization,
or his professor of mathematics and physics in the first and second class of
philosophical studies, and above all with regard to the reflections of new developments
in mathematics-physics written in his works.
Varaždin College hosted several of the best mathematicians-physicists of Austrian
Jesuit Province beginning with the celebrated optician Zacharias Traber to mathematician-
rector of Theresianum Theodor Kravina, later ennobled von Cronstein. Some of
them, as Kravina, came to Varaždin briefly for two or four semesters on teaching practice
after their Masters of philosophical sciences before their doctoral studies in theology.
Traber and several others worked in Varaždin on the most responsible positions in
their full strength.
The quick changes of Jesuit personnel in Varaždin put the Varaždin and other Colleges
in position to receive the world’s news without delay if we do not take into account
the delays in the Jesuit order as a whole caused by the prohibition of highlighting
of the reality of Copernican teachings up to 1757/58, the initial ban on Cartesian learning
and atomism, or the traditional Jesuit preference for geometry over other branches
of mathematics. With that in mind we present to the reader the dynamics of change in
attitudes of Varaždin experts in relation to simultaneous changes in other Croatian colleges
in Rijeka, Požega and Zagreb. These changes are then compared to events in the
Hungarian part of the Austrian provinces, to the contemporary situation of the whole
Austrian province and to the neighboring Czech Jesuit Province. The aim of the comparison
in the 17th and the first half of the 18th century is to understand the causes for
the extremely fast and complete acceptance of Bošković novelties after the publication
of his main work in Vienna in 1758. The exceptional success of Bošković’s followers was
short-lived in the decade and a half before the ban on the Jesuits in 1773. Because of
the ban Jesuit mathematicians and physicists have not lost their departments due to a lack of other experts, but their monopoly on the pedagogical area was gone forever and
with it the complete control of the material means that the Jesuits had before Theresian
reforms.
The attempt was made to compare the fast but after 1773 limited penetration of
Bošković’s ideas in the Habsburg monarchy with similar events a century later regarding
the penetration of kinetic-atomistic ideas of Joseph Stefan and Ludwig Boltzmann
circles, which also quickly won most of academic post in the same areas of Habsburg
Monarchy. Certainly there were few exceptions among the Viennese and Hungarian
astronomers associated with Maximilian Hell. Above all, in both cases different ideas
flourished in the university of Prague in the times of Joseph Stepling and Ernst Mach.
Ključne riječi
Varaždin; Ruđer Bošković; Jesuits; 17 th-18th Century; History of Physics and Mathematical Sciences
Hrčak ID:
171596
URI
Datum izdavanja:
30.12.2016.
Posjeta: 1.579 *