Indivisibles after the Discorsi: Cavalieri, Galileo and Liceti, and Cavalieri to Torricelli, Rocca and Mersenne, 1639–1641 (Opere XVIII)
Source: Internet Archive
agh6462.0018.001.umich.edu; local OCR excerpt.txt, lines 3021–3096, 5065–5200, 10052–10349, 10831–10879, 18555–18615, 18781–18800 and 19014–19045 of the archive’s_djvu.txt, retrieved 2026-09-08. Metadata: Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, vol. XVIII, Carteggio 1639–1642 (Florence, 1906): Cavalieri to Galileo, 28 June 1639; Galileo to Fortunio Liceti, 24 September 1639; Liceti to Galileo, 8 June 1640; Galileo to Liceti, 14 July 1640; Cavalieri to Evangelista Torricelli, 30 October 1641; Cavalieri to Giannantonio Rocca, 1641; Cavalieri to Marin Mersenne, 23 November 1641; Cavalieri to Torricelli, 17 December 1641. Extraction: archive.org OCR; Italian prose is clean, with doubled spaces. Rights: public domain.
Source digest
Cavalieri, having read the Discorsi, praises Galileo for navigating “the immense ocean of indivisibles, of vacua, of infinites, of light” and hopes his own indivisibles will be illuminated by Galileo’s. The exchange with Liceti carries Galileo’s late statements on the continuum and the infinite. The 1641 letters to Torricelli, Rocca and Mersenne show Cavalieri placing Torricelli’s Archimedean results by indivisibles and defending the method after Guldin. For this project, these are the “other friends” of the correspondence on the cut, and the 1639 letter records the reception of the First Day’s paradoxes by the author of the method.
Passage anchors
- Archive lines 3037–3049: the ocean of indivisibles and the promise of the Geometria’s indivisibles being illustrated by Galileo’s.
- Archive lines 18580 and 18609: results of Archimedes obtained by way of indivisibles, in the letters to Torricelli and Rocca.
Coverage and limits
Reading level passage for the 1639 letter and the 1641
lines; metadata for the Liceti exchange beyond its keyword
lines.