William Smith - 200 years of geomodelling celebrated at IAMG

The International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) commemorated William Smith (23rd March 1769 - 28th August 1839) and 200 years of geomodelling with geological surveys and academics across the globe at the 17th annual conference of the IAMG in Freiberg, Germany from the 5th to 13th September 2015. The aim of the IAMG is to promote the use of mathematics, statistics and geoinformatics in the geosciences. The annual IAMG conference is an opportunity for geoscientists to collaborate with mathematicians and statisticians and present their recent work. The

17th annual IAMG conference, with 300 participants from across the world, differed from previous IAMG conferences in that it included a special ‘Day of Surveys’ to acknowledge 200 years of science and methodologies to construct maps.

Select Document: Sir George Radcliffe’s “Original of Government” (1639) and Absolutist Political Theory in Stuart Ireland

A seventeenth-century manuscript miscellany, which once belonged to Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, contains a short treatise on the origins of government by Sir George Radcliffe. Radcliffe was legal assistant to Sir Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland (from January 1640 earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant). The treatise insisted on the divine origin of all human political power and implied that the best form of government was absolute monarchy, in which the monarch was free of all human law and subject to divine restraint alone. It will be suggested below that the composition of this treatise can be dated to the summer of 1639. This introduction will offer an outline of Radcliffe’s education and political career, explain the genesis of his treatise on government, point out some pertinent aspects of its argument, and finally assess the document’s significance.