Original scientific paper
Textbooks of the First Physicists Trained at the University of Zagreb
Tihomir Vukelja
; Prirodoslovno-matematički fakultet, Fizički odsjek, Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Ana Marija Petrić
Abstract
Physicists have been trained at the University of Zagreb since 1876, but today not much is known about the content of the training at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. In this paper an attempt is made to partially fill this gap through the identification of the main physics textbooks used at the Faculty of Arts in Zagreb until 1907. For this purpose the files of the students of the Faculty who took the teacher licensing examination in physics before the Royal Commission for the Examination of Candidates for Secondary School Teachers in Zagreb until 1907 have been searched. Textbooks are listed in 23 lists of study literature (53% of examinees) dated from 1886 to 1907. They are analysed and classified (books for the general public, secondary school textbooks, handbooks for practical exercises, preparatory textbooks, advanced textbooks for non-physicists, advanced textbooks for physicists, textbooks of theoretical physics) and the most frequent representatives of these classes are identified. The average scope and structure of the literature used has been determined by means of statistical analysis. Finally, on the basis of the collected data, a representative set of physics textbooks of students of physics at the University of Zagreb at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century has been constructed: this matches the standard physics literature of these students in terms of its scope, structure, and content.
Keywords
University of Zagreb; physics textbooks; the nineteenth century
Hrčak ID:
33621
URI
Publication date:
5.1.2009.
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