In W. Clark's interesting study "The Prosopography of Science", appeared in the Handbook in History of Science, vol 3, the author suggests using prosopographical methods ( the investigation of collective biographies of groups, or larger groups) to understand scientific communities in German-Austrian lands.
This suggestion resonates with our research idea, presented in the previous post, about creating catalogues of students and map their origins. In this post we shall present an extension of this idea that may lead to a bigger project in the future.
Vydra's Nachlass preserved at the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague preserves an interesting collection of lists of mathematics students, duly recorded by their teacher S. Vydra, from 1775 up to 1804 (with occasional gaps). These lists, which to our knowledge have never been studied in detail, promise to offer a wealth of data on the origin of students, the academic mobility and on the structure of mathematical courses. Unfortunately, we have not found similar lists for other courses.
Considering the amount of documents and the paloegraphical and philological challenges posed by such a task, a proper investigation would require a project devoted to this specific subject, and more years of research. Taken into account the impossibility of launching ourselves into an exhaustive inquiry, Jan Makovský decided to parse a small sample concerning the year 1797-1798, when Bernard Bolzano attended his first year of university. The results, summarised in the map below, concern the origin of Bolzano’s classmates for the academic year 1797-1798.
Visualization of the places of origins of students, according to Vydra's manuscript catalogue from 1797-98 Catalogus auditorum matheseos purae et applicatae 1797. PNP, Rkp., 77 ll, 4°). Software used: Palladio.
This is just a partial sample, hence no general consideration can be extrapolated from it except the (perhaps expected?) conclusion that the majority of student population was from the city of Prague or the nearby regions. However, we think that this little exercise should not be dismissed since it gives a hint about what could be achieved through a thorough study of these sources. Definitely, there is work to do!
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