The first edition of Robert Recorde's The Castle of Knowledge was printed at London by Reginalde Wolfe in 1556. The work is a treatise on the celestial sphere, written in the form of a dialogue between a master and a scholar. It is an original and exhaustive study intended to modernise Proclus and Sacrobosco. It deals chiefly with Ptolemaic astronomy but also includes some geographical information as understood in Recorde's time. In the preface to the reader he extols the heavens as God's handiwork and consequently meet for study. He also praises the rare wisdom and practical knowledge that...

The first edition of Robert Recorde's 'The Urinal of Physick' was printed in London, at the sign of the Brazen Serpent, by Reynolde Wolfe in 1547. It remained in print for over 130 years, the final edition appearing in 1679 as 'The Judgment of Urines'. The work is an early urological treatise, concerned with the practice of making diagnoses by inspecting the patient's urine. Its pages are full of sensible nursing practice in accordance with the mores of the time and the teachings of classical authors such as Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna and others. Recorde was a physician at the courts of...

The first edition of Robert Recorde's The Grounde of Artes was printed in London, at the sign of the Brazen Serpent, by Reynold Wolfe in 1543. The book teaches the rules and operations of arithmetic and provides many simple examples. It was probably intended as a textbook for the rapidly increasing number of mercantile clerks, but also for mariners engaged in the newly important science of celestial navigation. Recorde first shows how to carry out numerical operations using pen and paper, which in his time was a comparatively new and potentially confusing way of performing calculations. He...

The sole edition of Robert Recorde's The Whetstone of Witte was printed at London by John Kingston in 1557. One of Recorde's concerns in this book is to develop not only a means of representing powers of numbers, but also a means of naming them. Prior to the development of a numerical index notation, the names given to the powers was of considerable importance. Hence in these pages we find terminology which is now archaic, for instance the strange word zenzizenzizenzike, the name for the eighth power of a number. It is generally acknowledged that Recorde's treatise on algebra, in the section...

The first edition of Robert Recorde's The Pathway to Knowledge was printed in London, at the sign of the Brazen Serpent, by Reynold Wolfe in 1551. This book is the earliest work on geometry in the English language and was used as a standard textbook well into the middle of the seventeenth century. Recorde's prose is delightfully rhythmical and his poetical phrasing perhaps made learning less of a chore than otherwise for his studious readers. That he well knew this book, although modelled after Euclid, was breaking new ground is evidenced by his statement in the preface to the theorems: 'For...

"The Path Way to Knowledg" from Robert Recorde. Robert Recorde, welsh physician and mathematician (1512-1558).