Anachronisms in the History of Mathematics

Abstract

The worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven: anachronism 1 (Febvre, 1982, p. 5).To be sure, unchecked anachronism is the stuff of popular myth [. . . ] . Nevertheless, historical thinking should be concerned above all else with understanding temporality, how the present arises out of the past. So it will do no good to treat the past as its own country subject to no other law but its own and severed from moments in time that precede or succeed it (Lynch, 2004, pp. 241-2).