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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Mathematics and the Exact Sciences.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In a letter of September 21, 1781, who wrote to his mentor Jean d'Alembert that he feared mathematics had reached its limit?
(a) Sylvestre-Francois Lacroix.
(b) Joseph-Louis Lagrange.
(c) Bernard Fontenelle.
(d) Diderot.

2. According to the beginning of Chapter 1, in 1759 the French mathematician ________ described a revolution that he saw taking place in natural philosophy.
(a) Carnot.
(b) Euler.
(c) Jean Lerond d'Alembert.
(d) Newton.

3. The conversion of 'sGravesande confused the ideological debate because he was one of the leading supporters of ________ philosophy on the Continent.
(a) Platoian.
(b) Voltairian.
(c) Aristotlian.
(d) Newtonian.

4. Leibniz, in his differential calculus, broke up the curve into many little straight lines, creating a ________, in Chapter 2 of "Science and the Enlightenment."
(a) Polygon curve.
(b) Pentagon curve.
(c) Diagonal curve.
(d) Centripetal curve.

5. In the hands of ________, history led not to an understanding of God's will but rather to an understanding of human nature.
(a) Kant.
(b) Boyle.
(c) D'Alembert.
(d) David Hume.

Short Answer Questions

1. The names "biology" and "sociology" were names and fields that were created in what century, according to the narrator in Chapter 1?

2. Who was France's greatest hero of the Enlightenment partly because he was from England, the source of free thought and liberty and partly because he had solved the riddle of the planets, showing that their motions obeyed the same laws as motions on earth?

3. Descartes's "quantity of motion" is equivalent to our modern principle of the conservation of ________.

4. Who carried rational mechanics to the highest point of generality and abstraction that it was to reach during the Enlightenment?

5. Who stated in 1665 that "Analysis...seems to belong no more to Mathematics than to Physics, Ethics or any other Science"?

(see the answer key)

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