Joseph P. Byrne

LEONARDO DA VINCI'S TENSILE STRENGTH TESTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DISCOVERY OF ENGINEERING MECHANICS

Abstract In one of Leonardo Da Vincis notebooks, an experiment is described where strengths in tension are measured for various lengths of wire. The notebook indicates that the results of these experiments were that longer wires were weaker than shorter wires. This result defies classical mechanics of materials. This conflict has been explained as a note-taking failure by Leonardo. This short note develops an alternative explanation, based on the likely heterogeneity of the mechanical properties of the wire and elementary probability theory. This latter explanation has implications for the difficulty and delays experienced by early investigators into the mechanics of materials.

Honors Programs in Community Colleges: A Review of Recent Issues and Literature.

The author examined information about honors programs and curricula in 38 community colleges and districts in 19 states from a 24-year period (1974 to 1998). Four primary issues framed the literature review: why colleges have honors programs, what the stated goals are for such programs, how honors curricula are structured, and whether honors programs succeed. Both motivations and stated goals varied among the colleges and districts, but honors programs generally are designed to recognize and meet the needs of excellent students and to encourage excellence. Honors courses take several forms, but many programs rely heavily on special sections of core curriculum courses. Few published reports provide longitudinal data on honors program effectiveness but rely on data from student questionnaires that indicate high satisfaction levels. Nevertheless, some studies report program dropout problems. The author asserts the need for careful and balanced evaluative studies of honors programs.

Luxury and Public Happiness: Political Economy in the Italian Enlightenment: Wahnbaeck, Till: New York: Oxford University Press, 264 pp., Publication Date: April 2004

Till Wahnbaeck, once a doctoral student at Oxford and now a brand manager for Procter & Gamble, has crafted a fine brief study of economic thought and its influence in mid-eighteenth-century northern Italy. He begins by sketching the mainstreams of contemporary French and Dutch thought, focusing on the discussion of luxury, including its definitions and its role in their economies. He notes the continuing dominance of moral considerations among writers such as Montesquieu and Mandeville (luxury leads to immorality) and the challenges to it by the early physiocrats, especially Pierre de Boisguilbert, who would have a profound influence on Tuscan thinkers. Shifting to Italy, Wahnbaeck identifies three distinct schools of thought that developed along with or in reaction to the French trends: the “enlightened Catholicism” of Ludovico Muratori; the advancing “physiocracy” of Tuscan parish priests and other thinkers, especially the Sienese Sallustio Bandini; and the Milanese enlightenment, led by reformers such as Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri. Wahnbaeck demonstrates how each of these groups interacted with larger continental and Scottish intellectual movements and how this influence was in turn filtered and transformed by virtue of the local or regional conditions, concerns, and considerations in Italy. Like many Europeans, Italian thinkers, especially in the more cosmopolitan centers such as Milan and Florence, sought rational answers to social, political, and economic problems. The very early enlightened despotism of Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Tuscany and the essentially laissez-faire attitudes of the Habsburgs toward Lombard economic matters opened the doors for free discussions of issues and answers in academies and journals. Especially interesting are the transformations of the discussions by Beccaria and Vem in Milan, which are characterized by complete secularization of economic considerations and the application of advanced mathematics to their analysis. Not only was economic deliberation enabled by Vienna’s attitude, but it also was fueled by the fact that the previous generation was very heavily concerned with jurisprudential issues and that “enlightened” Lombards sought new and fertile fields. Wahnbaeck argues that one finds in Italian writings the origins of important advances in economic thought, such as the theory of investment, which proved vital to developing capitalism. Wahnbaeck’s work should interest general students of eighteenth-century thought and Italian social and intellectual history. As he notes, the “big books” of the era do not define the enlightened or the Enlightenment.