Paul Tannery

Paul Tannery (born December 20, 1843 in Mantes-la-Jolie in the Yvelines department , † November 27, 1904 in Pantin ) was a French mathematician and science historian who was an international leader in this field at the time.

Paul Tannery

biography

Tannery's father was a railroad engineer and the family roamed France on construction projects. He attended high schools in Le Mans and Caen (one of his teachers was the philosopher Jules Lachelier ) and studied from 1860 at the École polytechnique in Paris, whose entrance exams he passed with very good grades. There he acquired a good knowledge of mathematics, but during this time also dealt with, for example, Hebrew. In 1863 he left the École Polytechnique and studied at the École d´Applications des manufactures de l'état , in order to work from then on in the tobacco industry (then in the state monopoly). The move was perhaps influenced by his adherence to the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte , who advocated a state organized according to modern scientific methods, but it probably also followed the wishes of the family. Initially an engineer, he completed his career in half a dozen cities in France. First he was 1865-1867 in the state tobacco factory in Lille and then in administrative functions in Paris. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 he served as an artillery captain. Through his older brother Jules Tannery (1849–1910), who was a mathematician, he began to be interested in mathematics, and he used a long illness to study the ancient languages ​​in more depth. He was also in contact with Émile Boutroux . His first publications on the history of mathematics appeared in 1874 when he was posted to the building supervision in Bordeaux , where he had contacts with the university and was in the natural science society of Bordeaux. In 1877 he was transferred to Le Havre . Through trips abroad he made contacts with the other leading mathematical historians of his time Hieronymus Zeuthen , Heiberg and Moritz Cantor , with whom he also corresponded (especially with Zeuthen). In 1883 he was transferred to Paris, where he was able to make more scientific contacts again, had access to libraries and worked intensively on ancient Greek mathematics. From 1886 to 1888 he was back in the province in Tonneins and from 1888 director of a tobacco factory in Bordeaux. From 1890 to 1893 he was again on an administrative post at the headquarters in Paris and from 1893 director of the tobacco factory of Pantin near Paris. A severe blow for him was when he went empty-handed in 1903 when he filled the chair for the history of science at the Collège de France, which had become vacant after the death of Pierre Laffitte, despite the unanimous recommendation of the expert committees (the faculty and the Académie des Sciences). The ministry preferred a philosopher who was much less qualified in the history of science and who is now forgotten, which provoked protests both in France and abroad. He died shortly afterwards of pancreatic cancer. Tannery had given private courses in the history of mathematics in Paris in 1884/85 and also taught this at the chair for classical philology at the Collège de France (1892 to 1897).

In 1881 he married Marie-Alexandrine (Marie) Prisset (daughter of a notary in Poitiers ), who published his works after his death.

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His main works are his history of Greek science ( Pour l'histoire de la science hellène ) as well as of Greek geometry ( La géométrie grecque ) from 1887 and his history of ancient astronomy from 1893 ( Recherches sur l'histoire de l'astronomie ancienne ). He was a representative of an approach based on the original texts (of which, apart from the Pappos edition by Friedrich Hultsch, benchmarking critical editions by Heiberg were published in Denmark). According to Tannery, the exact sciences developed among the Greeks and he saw the elaboration of the reasons for this as one of his main tasks. For this he made numerous special studies.

Pour l'histoire de la science hellène treated the pre-Socratics for the first time under the aspect of the history of mathematics and natural science. In his history of mathematics he also traced the forerunners and roots of Euclid's elements and in his history of Greek astronomy the forerunners of Claudius Ptolemy's main work ( Hipparchus and older such as Apollonios von Perge). Later he also turned to the transmission of texts from Byzantium to the Middle Ages (not only mathematics, but also geomancy , for example ), whereby he recognized the importance of studying Arabic texts. He also examined medieval manuscripts on geometry and showed that it was not until the 12th century that scholars gained real access to geometry with the availability of Latin Euclid translations. Another focus of his work was mathematics in the 17th century.

From 1891 to 1896 he published the works of Pierre de Fermat in three volumes. He also got editions of Diophant of Alexandria (2 vols., 1893-1895) and was co-editor of the works of Descartes (with Charles Adam) published in twelve volumes from 1897 to 1913 . A letter he had begun by Marin Mersenne was continued after his death from 1932. His work edition contains not only works on the history of mathematics and astronomy, but also on ancient philosophy and classical philology.

His own works have been published in 17 volumes by Marie Tannery and various science historians, including his friend, math historian Hieronymus Zeuthen and Johan Ludvig Heiberg . Together with Zeuthen and Thomas Little Heath, Tannery stands for the long dominant interpretation of Greek mathematics as geometric algebra .

Fonts

• La géometrie grecque I: Histoire générale de la géométrie élémentaire, Paris 1887 (no other parts were published)
• Pour l'histoire de la science hellène. De Thalès à Empédocle, Paris, 1887, 2nd edition 1930 (editor A. Diés, foreword by Federigo Enriques )
• Recherches sur l'histoire de l'astronomie ancienne, Paris 1893
• Mémoires Scientifique, 17 volumes, Paris 1912 to 1950 (Marie Tannery, Hieronymus Zeuthen, JL Heiberg and others)
• Volumes 1-3: Sciences exactes dans l'antiquité (Toulouse - Paris, 1912-1915); Volume 4: Sciences exactes chez les Byzantins (1920); Volume 5: Sciences exactes au Moyen Age (1922); Volume 6: Sciences modern (1926); Volume 7: Philosophy ancienne (1925); Volume 8: Modern Philosophy (1927); Volume 9: Philology (1929); Volume 10: Supplément au tome 6. Sciences modern. Généralités historiques (1930); Vol. 11 to 12: Comptes-rendus et analyzes (1931-1933); Vol. 13-16: Correspondance (1934-1943); Volume 17: Biographie, bibliographie, compléments et tables (1950).
• Editor with commentary: Diophantus Alexandrinus, Opera Omnia, 2 volumes, Teubner 1893, 1895, Reprint Bibliotheca Teubneriana 1974

literature

• Maurice Caveing: Paul Tannery, in: Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, pp. 534-539
• René Taton : Paul Tannery, Dictionary of Scientific Biography
• Marie Tannery, Mémoires de la société des sciences physiques et naturelles de Bordeaux, series 6, volume 4, 1908, 299–382 (with list of publications)
• François Pineau: Historiographie de Paul Tannery et réceptions de son œuvre: sur l'invention du métier d'historien des sciences, dissertation, University of Nantes 2010, abstract
• George Sarton : Paul, Jules, and Marie Tannery (with a note on Grégoire Wyrouboff), in: Isis, Volume 38, 1947, pp. 33-51

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Paul Tannery. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Some of his works are online here: [1]

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Grégoire Wyrouboff, a crystallographer and positivist philosopher
2. ↑ As a forerunner he mentions Montucla's history of mathematics in particular , Michel Chasles as the founder of a new era and Ferdinand Nesselmann for emphasizing the philological basis from critical source study; he rejected the synthesis attempts by Hermann Hankel and Arneth, praised George Johnston Allman and the Pappos edition of Friedrich Hultsch
3. ↑ The standard work for the history of astronomy in France at that time was still the older work by Delambre