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David Gregory left many manuscripts and from these we can analyse the development of his ideas and his assimilation of Newtonian science. He was the nephew of James Gregorie (1638-75), a man justly renowned for his skill as a mathematician. David's study of the papers left on James' death led to his interest in integration by infinite series which was the subject of two publications of 1684 and 1688. Already, the influence of what he could learn of Isaac Newton's work was apparent. In 1683, David became Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University, which he left in 1691 to take up the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford where he remained until his death in 1708 of consumption. In spite of his enthusiasm for Newton's Principia (1687), his Edinburgh lectures were not Newtonian. In May 1694, David visited Newton at Cambridge and became one of the early group of Newtonian disciples. He studied Newton's mathematics, and the similar developments being made on the continent. In 1702, with the advice of Newton and his circle, he published hiss Astronomiae, which was the first astronomy text set in a Newtonian framework. As a mathematician, David was competent, but not always able to appreciate the new work of Newton and the continental mathematicians. His abilities were better used in expounding the work of others; the long-lasting popularity of his Edinburgh lectures attests their value, and his published and manuscript expositions of Newton's work, though not always free from error, have much to recommend them.

This study describes the development of climate science in Britain during the period from the 1950s to mid 1980s, with particular respect to the topic of CO₂-induced global warming. The study of climate and of its variations had traditionally been descriptive and regionally oriented, and regarded more or less as a minor branch of meteorology. With advances in numerical methods and computing technology, however, climate science was gradually transformed into a highly physics-based and mathematical science. By the late 1970s, climate science, became dominated largely by dynamical meteorologists, atmospheric physicists and physical oceanographers, armed with complex physico-mathematical modelling as a principal methodology. It was not that other approaches did not exist. In the 1960s and early 1970s, observational studies of climate such as those cultivated by Hubert Lamb, and simple climate modelling studies focusing on climate sensitivity and feedback processes, played a far more important role in raising the issues of climate change, both natural and anthropogenic. However, mainstream meteorologists and dynamical climatologists, who occupied a higher status within the cultural hierarchy of science, firmly believed that climate and its change could only be studied properly using numerical models of the large-scale atmospheric circulation – <i>i.e.</i> general circulation models (GCMs). This cultural hierarchy constrained the way in which the modern science of global climate change was developed and the issue of CO₂-induced global warming was understood and investigated. Such a tendency was particularly strong in Britain. Nevertheless, the resulting GCM-based science of global warming was by no means homogeneous. This thesis argues that different institutional goals, different national political environments, different understandings of how to relate to policy, and the hierarchical relations between scientific subcultures all combined to produce different paths and styles of global warming research.

By employing theoretical resources from sociology of science as well as science and technology studies (STS), and drawing on written sources and interviews, this thesis charts the development of fuzzy logic research in Japan. Overall, the development of fuzzy logic research in Japan is seen as a popularization process, in which three consecutive periods are identified with regards to the ways fuzzy logic reached a growing audience. In the first period, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, fuzzy logic research was an academic undertaking, with mathematical manipulations the main way of conducting research. The theory of scientific organization is applied to analyze fuzzy logic research in this period, and in particular the koza (departmental chair) system, a feature of the Japanese academic system, is found to play an important role in the proliferation of fuzzy logic. The second period, spanning from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, saw an upsurge of applications of fuzzy logic to control engineering. Technical demonstration was a core activity in this period, and STS work on demonstrations and proofs is utilized to discuss the way in which fuzzy logic drew the attention of a growing audience. Finally, in the third period, spanning from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, fuzzy logic reached the general public by attracting wide coverage in mass media. The role the Japanese transliteration of the word ‘fuzzy’, ‘fajyi’, played in the promotion of fuzzy logic in this period is discussed. The influence of the word ‘aimai’, the indigenous concept that served for a time as the Japanese translation of the word ‘fuzzy’, and the perceived affinity between fuzzy logic and Japanese thought, is analyzed as well.

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