Hypsicles

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Hypsikles ( ancient Greek Ὑψικλῆς , around 175 BC) was a Greek astronomer and mathematician.

Hypsicles lived in Alexandria . Almost nothing is known about his life. He is the author of the apocryphal book 14 of the elements of Euclid , which deals with regular polyhedra inscribed in a sphere - icosahedron and dodecahedron - and possibly goes back to a text by Apollonios edited by Hypsicles , as Hypsicles himself writes in the foreword (his father in Alexandria and a Basilides from Tire would have discussed the relevant book of Apollonios and found it to be defective).

He is also mentioned as the author of the Anaphorikos ( Ἀναφορικός , About the rise of the stars), in which the first reference in the Greek mathematical-astronomical literature is found about a system of divisions of a circle of 360 degrees (in the division of the zodiac circle), which he probably took over from the Babylonians, from whose astronomical knowledge his contemporary Hipparchus also drew. Thomas Heath doubts the authorship due to some mathematical errors in the text.

Diophantine of Alexandria also mentions a definition of polygonal numbers by Hypsicles, but a related book by Hypsicles is lost.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Thomas L. Heath: A history of Greek Mathematics, Volume 2: From Aristarchus to Diophanus . Edition Thoemmes, Bristol 1993, p. 213 (unchanged after the edition Oxford 1921)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hypsicles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ὑψικλῆς (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek mathematician and astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd century BC BC or 2nd century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH 2nd century BC BC or 1st century BC Chr.