Juan Miguel MARIN

Juan Miguel Marin's projects

At ETH Zurich, Juan Marin concentrated on medieval and post-medieval intellectual history for two projects, primarily working with theological and mathematical unedited documents ranging from 14th century Catalan-Provençal Kabbalistic combinatorics to 19th century German Nachlass by Bernhard Riemann and his contemporaries. Part of the first project will appear in his forthcoming book, Mystical Mathematics, Primordial Physics: From Ancient Platonism to Riemann´s Hypothesis. The second project extends his dissertation a series of  published articles that began with his article“Heterosexual Melancholia and Mysticism in the Early Society of Jesus.” Tentatively titled Smuggling Mysticism, Mathematics, and Minorities in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity the project uncovers the traces of 14th-16th centuries missionaries who were members of a  cross cultural underground network. Its undercover missionaries fought the burning of books and their authors, mystics and mathematicians charged with practicing sorcery and sodomy learned from women, Jews and Muslims. Some of These authors escaped as refugees “smuggled“ via the network, which extended from Franciscan and Jesuit missions in Asia and the Near East to the Hispanic American colonies. Many of these refugees contributed to cross-cultural scholarly exchanges. They also challenged unethical policies hostile to marginalized minority groups. The project argues that  network survived at least until early modernity, when a secret circle of Jesuits clandestinely printed many of these books while collaborating with mathematicians of the stature of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz.  

The second project: A Forgotten Algebra: Medieval mysticism and the development of the mathematical sciences revisits evidence uncovered in hisEuropean Journal of Physics´ article “'Mysticism' in quantum mechanics: the forgotten controversy.” There he showed how, in the early 20th century, many in the scientific community condemned cross-cultural approaches to mathematical physics through the lens of medieval European and Indian “mysticism.” A few years later, in his award winning essay “A shortcut through dreams to the Nobel Prize? :  Re-assessing W. Pauli's ‘Lucid' Platonism and ‘Background' Physics,”  he discussed Pauli´s background physics, that is, “the appearance of quantitative terms and concepts from physics in spontaneous fantasies in a qualitative and figurative -- i.e. symbolic sense.” Forgotten notebooks by Pauli and others reveal that mathematical insights were marginalized and often censored, due to factors inextricable from culture, race and gender. This leads to the question: what can be done to unearth and understand controversial texts that can serve as catalyst for dialogue concerning scientific discovery and ethical practices?