Pandrosion

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Pandrosion ( ancient Greek Πανδροσίων Pandrosíōn according to the handwritten tradition) was a Greek mathematician in Alexandria in the first half of the 4th century .

She is mentioned by Pappos and was his contemporary. Pappos may see her as a rival in math teaching and downplayed her skills. His criticism in Book 3 of his collection is derogatory and pedantic and relates to a new method proposed by Pandrosion to determine cube roots. He sarcastically instructs her to learn the difference between problem and sentence first, as some of her former students apparently had not learned this difference from her when they subsequently became his students. He condescendingly offers her to take tuition from him. Pappos then goes on to deal with a number of problems her former students posed to him. One seemed to him an able but misguided mathematician. Another problem that pandrosion addressed, according to Pappos, was the arithmetic , geometric, and harmonic mean of a semicircle. According to the Hypatia biographer Edward J. Watts, his statements rather give the impression that Pappos saw her as a serious rival.

In the past, pandrosion was mistaken for a man in literature. Friedrich Hultsch found a feminine form in a manuscript for pandrosion in his 1878 edition of Pappos' collection , but considered this to be a mistake and most of the historians afterwards did not question it. However, in the 1986 re- translation of Pappos' Book 7 by Alexander Raymond Jones , Jones stated that it was probably a woman after all. Hultsch had changed the name Πανδροσίων based on the male name Megethion mentioned in the manuscript to a masculine form ( Πανδροσίον ), although an adjective belonging to pandrosion ( κράτιστη most proficient ) was female. After Jones, Hultsch changed the gender for no good reason . As a mathematician, she came before Hypatia , who lived in the second half of the 4th century and until 415. Around the time of Hypatia there were three other women who dealt with philosophy and possibly mathematics, Sosipatra of Pergamon and the wife of Maximos of Ephesus belonged to an older generation, Asklepigenia of Athens was a contemporary of Hypatia and daughter of one of them Philosopher rivals ( Plutarch of Athens ). Pandrosion may have been a contemporary of Hypatia's father Theon of Alexandria . After Watts, Hypatia might still have known her, or at least received information about her from those who still knew her.

Your solution for the cube root was related to the classic problem of doubling the cube , which Pappos also dealt with. It had a recursive geometrical method, but it used three dimensions instead of just moving in the plane. According to Knorr, she also had an exact method for constructing the geometric mean that was simpler than that of Pappos.

No works by her are known and there is no reference to any of her works in ancient literature (except for Pappos), neither content from them is mentioned nor any of her students and their works. Like Hypatia, she appears to have given public lectures, with her students being men as with Hypatia.

The name pandrosion is a diminutive of pandrosos. Both names are rare in ancient times. There was a legendary heroine Pandrosos in Athens, daughter of Kekrops I , after whom the temple Pandroseion on the Acropolis with the sacred olive tree was named. The name Pandroseios occurs in an ancient African epigraph in Teuchiris-Arsinoe . Federico Commandino left out the name Pandrosion entirely in his Latin Pappos edition.

literature

  • Edward Jay Watts : Hypatia. The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017.
  • Gráinne McLaughlin: The Logistics of Gender from Classical Philosophy. In: Fiona McHardy, Eireann Marshall (eds.): Women's Influence on Classical Civilization. Routledge, London / New York 2004, pp. 7-25.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Alexander Jones (Ed.): Pappus of Alexandria. Book 7 of the Collection. Part 1: Introduction, Text, and Translation. Springer, New York 1986, p. 4.
  2. ^ Edward Jay Watts: Hypatia. The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017, pp. 94-97.
  3. ^ Wilbur Richard Knorr : Pappus' Texts on Cube Duplication. In: Wilbur Richard Knorr: Textual Studies in Ancient and Medieval Geometry. Birkhäuser, Boston 1989, pp. 63-76.
personal data
SURNAME Pandrosion
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH at 300
PLACE OF BIRTH Alexandria
DATE OF DEATH around 360
Place of death Alexandria