David Pingree

David Edwin Pingree (born January 2, 1933 in New Haven , Connecticut , † November 11, 2005 in Providence , Rhode Island ) was an American mathematics and science historian and orientalist.

Live and act

Pingree studied at the Phillips Academy in Andover (Massachusetts) (graduated in 1950) and then at Harvard University classical philology and Sanskrit (which he already learned in Andover in self-study, but he was also an Arabist, read Persian and Babylonian cuneiform texts), with one Bachelor's degree “magna cum laude” 1954. In 1954/55 he studied manuscripts in the Vatican library with a Fulbright Fellowship. In 1957/1958 he traveled to India for the first time with a Ford Fellowship, where he deepened his Sanskrit studies and studied manuscripts. In 1960 he received his doctorate at Harvard under Daniel Ingalls and Otto Neugebauer with a thesis on the influence of Hellenistic astrology in India. He was then a professor at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (where Neugebauer sent him to study Babylonian texts) before Otto Neugebauer brought him in 1971 as his successor (Neugebauer retired in 1969) as professor of mathematical history at Brown University . In 1986 he was head of the faculty there. In 1968/69 and 1978/79 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . From 1981 to 1986 he was also AD White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University .

Throughout his life he was handicapped by decreased vision (blind in one eye and only 20 percent vision in the other).

Pingree was particularly interested in the transfer of mathematical and astronomical knowledge across cultural boundaries, such as from Babylonia to Greece, from Greece to the Islamic world, from the Islamic world to India, and from India to Western Europe in the Middle Ages. In 1963 he published an article in the journal Isis, in which he presented arguments for a direct translation of Greek texts in the 2nd to 4th centuries AD in India. He has published 43 books and monographs and over 240 scientific journal articles. His five-volume directory of Sanskrit manuscripts with scientific content (Census of Exact Sciences in Sanskrit) was published between 1970 and 1994. He also worked with the Viennese Assyriologist Hermann Hunger in the publication of Babylonian astronomical texts (such as the MUL.APIN cuneiform text of the British Museum in 1989). . With him he also wrote Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia (1999)

He was a Junior Fellow at Harvard, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1975 and a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 . He was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Oriental Society. In 1971 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 1992 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.

His extensive private library (over 22,000 volumes and various manuscripts) was acquired by Brown University in 2007.

His PhD students include Kim Plofker and Takao Hayashi .

Fonts

• Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit (= Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. 81, 1-5, ISSN  0065-9738 ). 5 volumes. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia PA 1970, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1994.
• with Otto Neugebauer : The Pañcasiddhāntikā of Varāhamihira. (= Historisk-filosofiske scripts. 6, 1, (1) -2, ISSN  0023-3307 ). 2 volumes. Munsgaard, Copenhagen 1970–1971.
• with Erica Reiner : Babylonian Planetary Omens. 4 volumes. Styx et al., Groningen et al. 1975-2005.
• History of Mathematical Astronomy in India. In: Dictionary of Scientific Biography . Volume 15 = Supplement 1: Roger Adams - Ludwik Zejszner. Topical essays. Scribner, New York NY 1978, ISBN 0-684-14779-3 , pp. 533-633.
• with Hermann Hunger : MUL.APIN. An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform (= Archive for Orient Research . Supplement. 24). Berger, Horn 1989.
• with Hermann Hunger: Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia (= Handbook of Oriental Studies . Dept. 1: The Near and Middle East. Vol. 44). Brill, Leiden et al. 1999, ISBN 90-04-10127-6 .
• with Takanori Kusuba: Arabic Astronomy in Sanskrit. Al-Birjandī on Tadhkira II, Chapter 11 and its Sanskrit Translation (= Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science. 47). Brill, Leiden et al. 2002, ISBN 90-04-12475-6 .

Web links

• History of the Mathematical History Department at Brown University
• Biography in the Biographical Memoirs American Philosophical Society, PDF file (1.06 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Biography of Gary Thompson ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ To MUL.APIN