The Blind Teacher

25 Oct 2022 3.30-5pm

Event in the Forum at Wellcome Collection. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY-NC 4.0.

Overview

Join Professor Chris Mounsey to find out about the life of blind teacher Nicholas Saunderson, who was a Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University between 1711 and 1739. Chris will draw on his own experiences as a partially sighted Professor in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Winchester.   

You will learn how the sources available about Saunderson, written by six sighted men, have been used to construct the idea of him as a teacher. Chris will explore a set of lecture notes by Saunderson on Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’, held within Wellcome Collection, Denis Diderot’s ‘Lettre sur les Auvergles’, and Saunderson’s own ‘Elements of Algebra’.  

The talk will reveal how Saunderson helped his students to think in a spatial way about mathematics through his own experience of sight loss. Chris Mounsey will also introduce his concept of ‘variability’ as a way of understanding disability.

The event will take place in our building and will be livestreamed on Wellcome Collection’s YouTube channel. Both will have captions but only the event in the building will have British Sign Language interpretation.

You can book a ticket to join the event in-venue or online. The in-venue event starts at 15:30, while the online version begins at 16:00. A recording of the event will be available afterwards.

For those attending in person, the original texts discussed will be on display and an audio-description guide to the texts will be available.

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