This meeting, to be held at Northern Kentucky University on Friday-Saturday, February 10-11, 2023, marks the ORESME Reading Group's 25th Anniversary! To celebrate, we shall read some of the work of our esteemed namesake, Nicole Oresme (1323—1382). Oresme was a Norman philosopher of the late Middle Ages who wrote on a wide variety of topics. He is known by mathematicians today mainly for his “latitude of forms,” a geometric visualization of Aristotelian categories which Oresme employed to comment on contemporary work of the Merton Scholars in early kinematics; it is generally (and debatably) viewed today as a precursor of the modern concept of function in graphical form. Oresme is also known for his proof of the divergence of the harmonic series. We will read from both these subjects in Oresme’s works.

Our readings:

• Marshall Claggett (1968). Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions: a treatise on the uniformity and difformity of intensities known as Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum. Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Pages iv-xiii (title page, prefatory matter); 164-207 (De configurationibus 1.i-1.xvi); 270-281 (De configurationibus II.i-II.iv); 408-411 (De configurationibus III.vii); 526-535 (Questiones super geometriam Euclidis, Questio X).
• Otero, Daniel E. (2023). Transcription and translation of Nicole Oresme: Quaestiones super geometricam Euclidis: Questio 2, from Busard, H. L. L., (Ed.). Nicole Oresme: Quaestiones super geometricam Euclidis. Leiden: Brill, 1961, pp. 3-6, 74-77.

In addition, to support our discussion of Oresme's contribution to the development of the function concept, I am also sharing these helpful articles:

• Youschkevitch, A. P. (1976). "The concept of function up to the middle of the 19th century". Archive for History of Exact Sciences. 16 (1): 37–85.
• Kleiner, Israel (1989). "Evolution of the Function Concept: A Brief Survey". The College Mathematics Journal. Mathematical Association of America. 20 (4): 282–300.