Some Material on Greek Mathematics and Culture

Much of my material on Greek mathematics comes from T. L. Heath's A History of Greek Mathematics (2 vols; Dover) and G. E. R. Lloyd's
Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (Norton). The library has the second work but only volume 2 of the first.

Here is a map of ancient Greece and Ionia, and here is a map showing Greek colonization in the Mediterranean and Black Seas.

Three early Greek world maps, due to Anaximander, Hecataeus, and Herodotus.

Here are some ancient Greek numerals, and here is a Word file that shows and discusses ancient written Greek.

A Mathematica notebook that draws the trisectrix (also called quadratrix) of Hippias of Elis.

A Mathematica notebook that demonstrates Archytas of Tarentum's construction of the double mean proportion.

Here is an excerpt from The Peloponnesian War of Thucydides, describing the plague at Athens.

Here are the 5 so-called Platonic solids.

My discussion of Theodorus of Cyrene's possible method for showing the irrationality of certain roots is based on W. Knorr's The Evolution of the Euclidean Elements, available in Bailey/Howe.

Here is an explanation of Eudoxus' model of the heavens. We also have a Mathematica notebook that draws, step by step, the hippopede of Eudoxus.

Here is a Mathematica notebook illustrating how Menaechmus obtained the conic sections by cutting cones of various apertures.

Here is a link to D. E. Joyce's site containing the complete Elements of Euclid, gloriously illustrated and with copious explanations.

Here is a link to JSTOR, as shown in class.

Euclid's influence can be seen in this handout showing the definitions and axioms used by Newton and Spinoza.

Here is an interactive exposition of Archimedes' quadrature of the parabola from "The Method" (courtesy of Henry Mendell at California State University, Los Angeles).

Here is a link to Wolfram Mathworld's article on the Archimedes Cattle Problem.

Here is the official website on the Archimedes Palimpsest.

Here is a Mathematica notebook demonstrating the conic sections as defined by Apollonius of Perga.

Here is a very fun interactive site on the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

Here is a Mathematica notebook that illustrates the stereographic projection used in making an astrolabe.

Here is a reconstruction of Ptolemy's map of the world.

Three links about Ptolemy: the beginning of his chord table; the instrument with which he (may have) measured the obliquity of the ecliptic; a diagram explaining how the angular measurements from the instrument yield the obliquity. Here is an image of an armillary sphere (sometimes called a spherical astrolabe), similar to the one used by Ptolemy.