Galileo's Discorsi as a Tool for the Analytical Art.

A heretofore overlooked response to Galileo's 1638 Discorsi is described by examining two extant copies of the text (one which has received little attention in the historiography, the other apparently unknown) which are heavily annotated. It is first demonstrated that these copies contain annotations made by Seth Ward and Sir Christopher Wren. This article then examines one feature of Ward's and Wren's responses to the Discorsi, namely their decision to re-write several of Galileo's geometrical demonstrations into the language of symbolic algebra.