TY  - BOOK
AU  - Wardhaugh,Benjamin
TI  - Poor Robin's prophecies: a curious almanac, and the everyday mathematics of Georgian Britain 
SN  - 9780199605422
U1  - 510.9 23
PY  - 2012///
CY  - Oxford
PB  - Oxford University Press
KW  - Poor Robin.
KW  - Mathematics
KW  - England
KW  - History
KW  - 18th century
KW  - 19th century
KW  - Almanacs, English
KW  - Great Britain
KW  - 1714-1837
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index
N2  - Author, astrologer, journalist, satirist, and 'well-willer to the mathematics', Poor Robin of Saffron Walden was a fantastic, yet invented, figure of British popular culture from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period. Poor Robin's Almanac first appeared in 1662, developing an enthusiastic following and long outliving its original creator to last until 1828. Benjamin Wardhaugh tells the great story of Georgian popular mathematics - through Poor Robin's remarkable life, from his humble beginnings as an almanac-writer through to best-selling stardom, controversy, and decline. Using the character, wit, and columns of Poor Robin, Wardhaugh explores the mathematics of ordinary people, from learning sums to using mathematics in weighing and measuring, in business, agriculture, map-making, and navigation. This is a history of mathematics that is rarely thought about -- creative, popular, and led by practical and social needs. It is centered on the ordinary people that used it. Their names remain little-known; their solutions have vanished along with the situations that required them; but their energy and ideas - as captured by Poor Robin - create a wonderfully rich picture of what mathematics can be, and has been
ER  -