Bradwardine

Thomas Bradwardine

Born: 1290 in Chichester, England
Died: 26 Aug 1349 in Lambeth, London, England

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Thomas Bradwardine studied at Merton College Oxford, and became proctor there. In 1335 he moved to London, and two years later he was made chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Bradwardine was a noted mathematician as well as theologian and was known as 'the profound doctor'. He studied bodies in uniform motion and ratios of speed in the treatise De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (1328). He tried to disprove atomism using geometry, but questioned the logic of his own arguments as he felt perhaps the existence of geometry already assumes that atomism is false.

Bradwardine became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349 but died of the plague soon afterward during the Black Death.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. H L Crosby, Thomas of Bradwardine. His Tractus de Proportionibus. Its significance for the development of Mathematical Physics (Madison, Wis., 1955).
  4. A G Molland, An examination of Bradwardine's Geometry, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 19 (1978), 113- .
  5. E W Dolnikowski, Thomas Bradwardine : a view of time and a vision of eternity in fourteenth- century thought (Leiden, 1995). 
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