Hypsicles biography sample
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JewishEncyclopedia.com
The science that treats of the measurement of quantities and the ascertainment of their properties and relations. The necessity of studying astronomy for calendric purposes caused the ancient Hebrews to cultivate various branches of mathematics, especially arithmetic and geometry, applications of which are frequent in the Mishnah and Talmud. With regard to arithmetic there occur the four rules, in both whole numbers and fractions; even the decimal system is alluded to by Rabba, who says that the Persians called the number 10 "one" (Ber. 60a). As to geometry, the treatises 'Erubin, Kelim, Ohalot, etc., contain many applications of planometry and stereometry. The terms "bigon," "trigon," "tetragon," and "pentagon" are found several times in the Talmud, both in their geometrical sense, signifying a figure of two, three, four, or five angles, and in their arithmetical sense, expressing the numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5. As early as the forty-ninth "middot" of R. Natha
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- 180 BC Hypsicles: Number Theory
Hypsicles was born in 190 B.C.
in Alexandria Egypt. He was a mathematician and astronomer. He wrote the “Anaphorikos” or “On the Ascension of Stars,” where he divided the Zodiac into 360° and used arithmetic progression, “a sequence in which each number increases by the same amount over the previous one” (O’Connor & Robertson, 1999). He also wrote Book XIV of Euclid’s Elements, which was concerned with inscribing regular solids in a sphere (Hypsicles of Alexandria, 2008). Diophantus of Alexandria, writer of the Arithmetica, which was the most dominant number theoretic work of ancient times, explained properties of polygonal numbers and added a rule to get the nth m-agonal number, n [2 + (n – 1) (m – 2)]/2, which he credited to Hypsicles (Tattersall, 2005). The number theory, a branch of mathematics, is concerned with the study of the integers
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1. Introduction
1Greek mathematics fryst vatten something more than a handful of celebrated authors. It fryst vatten a general universe of discourse canonized as a literary genre and comprising organized pieces of mathematics that may greatly differ in content and style.1 This universum of discourse addresses a number of disjoined readerships: we cannot assume that a reader of Apollonius’ celebrated treatise on conic sections could have belonged to the same social and cultural milieu as users of Theon of Alexandria’s “Little Commentary” on Ptolemy’s astronomical tables.2 However, different readerships do not necessarily signify that the mathematics concerned can be classed on different “levels”. Value-laden categories of this kind cannot be used to assess the extant Greek Mathematical Corpus (GMC henceforth) as a whole.
2The specific aim of this study fryst vatten to assess the GMC as a whole using quantitative methods. Such an approach will allow us to outline a number of dynamics within the GMC, and to cor