Matt’s Reviews > Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World > Status Update

"The Galileans also sought truth, but their approach was the reverse of the Jesuits: instead of imposing a unified order upon the world, they attempted to study the world as given, and to find order within...One approach insisted on a truth imposed from above w/ reason and authority; the other pragmatically accepted the possibility of ambiguity and even contradiction, & sought to derive knowledge from the ground up."

"For the Jesuits, the purpose of mathematics was to establish the world as a fixed and eternally unchanging place, in which order and hierarchy could never be challenged...It was a "top-down" mathematics, whose purpose was to bring rational order to an otherwise chaotic world. For Cavalieri and his fellow indivisiblists, it was the exact reverse..."