HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

David Edwin Pingree (January 2, 1933,
New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,023 ...
 – November 11, 2005,
Providence, Rhode Island Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay ...
) was an American historian of mathematics in the ancient world. He was a University Professor and Professor of History of Mathematics and Classics at Brown University.


Life

Pingree graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1950. He studied at
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
, where he earned his doctorate in 1960 with a dissertation on the supposed transmission of
Hellenistic astrology Hellenistic astrology is a tradition of horoscopic astrology that was developed and practiced in the late Hellenistic period in and around the Mediterranean Basin region, especially in Egypt. The texts and technical terminology of this tradition o ...
to India. His dissertation was supervised by
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr. Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Sr. (May 4, 1916 – July 17, 1999) was the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University. Early life Ingalls was born in New York City and raised in Virginia. He received his A.B. in 1936, at Harvard majori ...
and Otto Eduard Neugebauer. After completing his PhD, Pingree remained at Harvard three more years as a member of its Society of Fellows before moving to the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
to accept the position of Research Associate at the Oriental Institute. He joined the History of Mathematics Department at Brown University in 1971, eventually holding the chair until his death. As successor to Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) in Brown's History of Mathematics Department (which Neugebauer established in 1947), Pingree numbered among his colleagues men of extraordinary learning, including Abraham Sachs and
Gerald Toomer Gerald James Toomer (born 23 November 1934) is a historian of astronomy and mathematics who has written numerous books and papers on ancient Greek and medieval Islamic astronomy. In particular, he translated Ptolemy's ''Almagest'' into English. ...
.


Career

Jon McGinnis of the University of Missouri, St. Louis, describes Pingree's life-work thus:
... Pingree devoted himself to the study of the exact sciences, such as mathematics, mathematical astronomy and astral omens. He was also acutely interested in the transmission of those sciences across cultural and linguistic boundaries. His interest in the transmission of the exact sciences came from two fronts or, perhaps more correctly, his interest represents two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, he was concerned with how one culture might appropriate, and so alter, the science of another (earlier) culture in order to make that earlier scientific knowledge more accessible to the recipient culture. On the other hand, Pingree was also interested in how scientific texts surviving from a later culture might be used to reconstruct or cast light on our fragmentary records of earlier sciences. In this quest, Pingree would, with equal facility use ancient Greek works to clarify Babylonian texts on divination, turn to Arabic treatises to illuminate early Greek astronomical and astrological texts, seek Sanskrit texts to explain Arabic astronomy, or track the appearance of Indian astronomy in medieval Europe.
In June 2007, the Brown University Library acquired Pingree's personal collection of scholarly materials. The collection focuses on the study of mathematics and exact sciences in the ancient world, especially India, and the relationship of Eastern mathematics to the development of mathematics and related disciplines in the West. The collection contains some 22,000 volumes, 700 fascicles, and a number of manuscripts. The holdings consist of both antiquarian and recent materials published in Sanskrit, Arabic, Hindi, Persian and Western languages.


Awards

Recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in 1975 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, he was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, the
American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communi ...
, and the
Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...
; he was also A.D. White Professor-at-Large at
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...
from 1995.


Selected works

* 1970: ''Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit'' (5 volumes)
American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communi ...
, Philadelphia * 1976: ''Dorothei Sidonii carmen astrologicum'' (Teubner, Leipzig). * 1978: ''The Yavanajātaka of Sphujidhvaja'' (2 volumes), Harvard Oriental Series 48 * 1986:''Vettii Valentis Antiocheni Anthologiarum Libri Novem'' (Teubner, Leipzig). * 1997: (edited with Charles Burnett) ''The Liber Aristotilis of Hugo of Santalla'', Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 26, London * 2002: (with Takanori Kusuba) ''Arabic Astronomy in Sanskrit: Al-Birjandī on Tadhkira II, Chapter 11 and its Sanskrit Translation'', Brill, Leiden * 2005: (with Erica Reiner) ''Babylonian Planetary Omens'', Brill, Leiden * See th
Worldcat listing
for further titles. ;Articles in dictionaries and encyclopedias * ''Pingree D., Brunner C. J.'
Astrology and astronomy in Iran
//
Encyclopædia Iranica ''Encyclopædia Iranica'' is a project whose goal is to create a comprehensive and authoritative English language encyclopedia about the history, culture, and civilization of Iranian peoples from prehistory to modern times. Scope The ''Encycl ...
* Astrology // BritannicaDavid E. Pingree Contributor
/ref> * Astrology // The Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973–74)


References


Sources and external links

*Memorial by Kim Plofker and Bernard R. Goldstein in ''Aestimatio'' (http://www.ircps.org/aestimatio/2/70-71) *Memorial by Toke Lindegaard Knudsen in the Bulletin of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics https://web.archive.org/web/20070927032441/http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/~molinsky/cshpm/Bulletin/38-2006.pdf (pp. 5–6) *Death notice in the Brown Daily Herald https://web.archive.org/web/20070929104430/http://www.browndailyherald.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&uStory_id=47d666ba-15db-402b-bd71-a539c61b03c5 *"An Indiana Jones of Mathematics" in the George Street Journal https://web.archive.org/web/20080516054525/http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/Pingree.html *A collection of PDFs of some texts used by Dr. Pingree and his students, including a copy of a Heiberg edition of the Almagest used by Dr. Pingree himself: http://www.wilbourhall.org {{DEFAULTSORT:Pingree, David Edwin 1933 births 2005 deaths Harvard University alumni Brown University faculty Cornell University faculty Harvard Fellows Historians of science American historians of mathematics MacArthur Fellows American astrological writers American male non-fiction writers 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American historians 21st-century American male writers 21st-century American historians