Talk:Ancient Greek mathematics

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Potential changes

I am going to make a few additions under the achievements header. Austinroberts3567 (talk) 17:47, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I also added an addition under achievements about the Sector theorem. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SouryaMo (talk • contribs) 18:03, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

SouryaMo, this section is devoted to seminal achievements, that is to achievements that have influenced mathematics for centuries. Menelaus theorem is not among them, and there are hundreds Greek theorems of a similar importance. As it is not reasonable to list them, Menelaus theorem has not its place here. So, I have reverted your addition. D.Lazard (talk) 18:44, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I plan on adding some minor changes to the article under the Archaic and classical periods. After doing some research I found that the majority of the first paragraph was plagiarized from "A History of Mathematics" by Carl B. Boyer. I plan on rewriting most of that paragraph and adding the proper references to his work. Austinroberts3567 (talk) 15:46, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Added some stuff to the Hellenistic and roman period section — Preceding unsigned comment added by SouryaMo (talk • contribs) 21:11, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 20 January 2021 and 7 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): SouryaMo, Austinroberts3567. Peer reviewers: Aewmnw, CarricoHayden08.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:42, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

Just found this page. It contains a list of sources that could be useful for improving this article. Gererhyme (talk) 10:34, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 19 April 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved per consistency (non-admin closure) >>> Extorc.talk 20:37, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Greek mathematics → Ancient Greek mathematics – consistency with Ancient Greek medicine, Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek astronomy, more clearly delineates that the subject of this article is about mathematics in the ancient Greek language during classical and late antiquity, not modern Greece. Psychastes (talk) 17:38, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support for consistency. Srnec (talk) 03:52, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Netz's list of ancient authors seems to be missing a few?

I cross-referenced the 29 authors in mathematics, astronomy, and music listed in this paper by Reviel Netz with the 144 authors listed in this one (also by Netz, cited by the other one), and there are at least a few on the list of 144, including Aristotle(!) and Marinus of Neapolis, whose works do survive but are not included in his list of 29. Confusingly, he also includes some (originally) Latin authors in his list of 144, such as Apuleius and Vitruvius, who do have extant works, along with eight *anonymous* authors of works that survive! And there are extant writings by other authors (at the very least Cleonides, and also the anonymous 6th century author of Elements Book XV) that go wholly unmentioned by him in either list. So we're already at 39 surviving authors out of 146 rather than 29 out of 144. And there may be more, these are just the ones I've noticed so far in about half an hour, I haven't dug in that thoroughly.

Since both of Netz's numbers are apparently incorrect, I propose we scrap the sentence with a specific number of authors and attribution to Netz 2011, and just list out the authors whose works do survive, in parallel with the arabic list. Alternatively, if the list is really only valuable in the context of a percentage of surviving authors, we could scrap the whole list and just add surviving works to a bibliography? Or try to find another source that lists them all out. But whatever the case, I believe the current (inaccurate) numbers should be removed. Psychastes (talk) 05:05, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why is it confusing to include Latin authors? The titles here are "The Bibliosphere of Ancient Science" and "Classical mathematics in the classical Mediterranean". Anyhow, Netz's 1997 paper is probably the more relevant here. Some other sources citing that that might be useful:

Netz 2002, "Greek Mathematicians: A Group Picture" doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198152484.003.0011
Keyser & Irby-Massie, eds., 2008, Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists doi:10.4324/9780203462737
Zhmud & Kouprianov 2018, "Ancient Greek Mathēmata" doi:10.1086/699921
Acerbi & Masià 2022, "The Greek Mathematical Corpus: a Quantitative Appraisal" doi:10.4000/histoiremesure.15779

Personally I don't think the precise numbers are that important outside the specific context of some kind of quantitative survey. It would be fine to give rough numbers / rough proportions in Wikipedia.

–jacobolus (t) 18:39, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify, it's not confusing to include the Latin authors amongst authors whose works survive (I think we should), but rather, they're *not* included in that list, but are included in the list of 144 authors, so it makes it seem like a larger proportion of works are lost than actually are.

My main concern with a rough number here is that we can't really say e.g. "there are roughly 29 authors whose works survive" and then list significantly more than 30 people, but I think a rough proportion would probably work. Looks like Acerbi & Masià 2022 have a figure of roughly 30% (and also observe that Netz's methods are incorrect, which we probably don't need to mention in the article but I think helps justify removing him), any objections to using that 30% figure? Psychastes (talk) 20:11, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]