Wilbur Richard Knorr

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Wilbur Richard Knorr (born August 29, 1945 in Brooklyn , New York City , † March 18, 1997 in Palo Alto ) was an American mathematician.

Life

Knorr studied at Harvard University , where he obtained his master’s degree in 1968 (bachelor’s degree in 1966 summa cum laude ) and his doctorate in 1973 with John E. Murdoch and GEL Owen. There he studied history of science, ancient Greek, Arabic and Hebrew (he had a linguistic talent and taught himself these languages). During his PhD, he was a teaching fellow at Harvard and an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley . As a post-doctoral student he spent one year at Cambridge University , then four years as a professor at Brooklyn College , one year at the Institute for Advanced Study (1978/79) and then professor at Stanford University . He died of skin cancer.

Knorr was known for his studies of Euclid , Archimedes , Apollonios von Perge . The focus at the beginning was the development of Greek mathematics from the time before Euclid to Archimedes and Apollonios, its character, its foundations and its methods. This was the subject of his dissertation, which is based on the analysis of a famous passage in Plato's Theaetetos (Irrationalities in the snail ). Instead of the Pythagoreans, he ascribes the discovery of irrationalities to Theodoros of Cyrene and Theaetetus, who appear in Plato's dialogue , and accordingly also to some books of Euclid's Elements. Basically he distinguished an older corpus (going back to the time of Hippocrates of Chios , mainly dealing with triangles and angles, books 1, 3, 6) and a younger corpus (books 2, 4, 10, 13, mainly rectangles and areas, Theaetetos , Theodorus and Eudoxus of Knidos ). This gave rise to the book The evolution of the Euclidean elements and Knorr was one of the leaders in the re-evaluation of the development of Greek mathematics, which does not start so much from later mathematical concepts (as the classical authors in this field Paul Tannery , Hieronymus Zeuthen , Thomas Little Heath , Bartel Leendert van der Waerden ) but from a consideration within the mathematics of their time. He meticulously attached great importance to details and was also able to spark controversy with a sharp tongue. In 1996, for example, he published a criticism of the Euclid edition by Johan Ludwig Heiberg, which was previously considered to be solid (he advocated a preference for Arabic tradition like Martin Klamroth in 1881 ). Later he dealt with the transmission of texts and their transmission from antiquity through the Arabs to medieval Europe. Most recently he dealt with texts on mathematics from the Middle Ages, but did not get around to publishing much about them.

In his Textual studies in ancient and medieval geometry , half of the approximately 800 pages discuss the tradition of Archimedes' circular measurement (where he speculated that Hypatia published the text). In a new edition of the Archimedes book by Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (Princeton University Press 1987) he gave an overview of the more recent research.

Knorr was co-editor of Historia Mathematica , Isis, and the Archive for History of Exact Sciences .

In his youth and as a student (first violin in the Harvard Orchestra) he was a gifted violin player, which he gave up at Stanford because he didn't have the time. One of his hobbies was textual studies about the Bible, but he did not publish anything about it.

Fonts

  • The evolution of the euclidean elements. A study of the theory of incommensurable magnitudes and its significance for early Greek geometry , Dordrecht, Reidel 1975
  • Ancient sources of the medieval tradition of mechanics , Florence 1982 (Supplement to the Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza)
  • The ancient tradition of geometric problems , Boston 1986, Reprint Dover 1993
  • Textual studies in ancient and medieval geometry , Boston 1989
  • Archimedes lost treatise on the centers of gravity of solids , Mathematical Intelligencer 1978/9
  • Archimedes and the Elements. Proposal of a revised chronological ordering of the Archimedean corpus , Archive Hist. Exact Sciences Vol 19, 1978, pp 211-290
  • Bibliographical appendix to the new edition of Dijksterhuis Archimedes , Princeton UP 1987
  • Archimedes , in: Jacques Brunschwig , Geoffrey ER Lloyd , Pierre Pellegrin (Eds.), Greek Thought. A Guide to Classical Knowledge, Belknap Press, Harvard UP 2000, pp. 544-553
  • Knorr: La croix des mathematiciens- Euclids theory of irrational lines , Bulletin AMS, Vol. 9, 1983, p. 41

literature

  • David Fowler In Memoriam Wilbur Richard Knorr (1945-1997): An Appreciation , Historia Mathematica, 25 (1998) 123-132.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In particular the concept of geometric algebra among the Greeks, according to which the discovery of irrational numbers would have led to a geometrical cladding of a formulation that was originally algebraic like that of the Babylonians. This long prevailing image has been criticized by Jacob Klein , Árpád Szabó and others before
  2. ↑ Knorr, The wrong text of Euclid: On Heiberg's text and its alternatives, Centaurus, Volume 38, 1996, pp. 208-276
personal data
SURNAME Knorr, Wilbur Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 29, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City
DATE OF DEATH March 18, 1997
Place of death Palo Alto