Abstract
Before “he married Mary Burton, second daughter … of a hosier in Newgate Street,” young Gulliver, according to Swift,1 “learned navigation and other parts of mathematics useful to those who intend to travel.” Mathematics for its own sake began to interest Gulliver, a few years later, because of his adventures (not mentioned by Swift and only recently recorded in the Mathematical Gazette2) on an island that he called Land without One, Two, Three. Upon his return to England he began to study what then - in the early 1700’s - was the most advanced branch of mathematics - analysis: the theory of functions and fluents. On a later trip to the Land without One, Two, Three3, Gulliver discovered a neighbouring isle called Applyland - a name that had originated in the preoccupation of the insular arithmeticians with scientific applications.
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© 1979 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Menger, K. (1979). Gulliver in Applyland. In: Selected Papers in Logic and Foundations, Didactics, Economics. Vienna Circle Collection, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9347-1_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9347-1_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-277-0321-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-9347-1
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