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 134,02 ...
– 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
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
in the
ancient world
Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient history cov ...
. 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 higher le ...
, where he earned his doctorate in 1960 with a dissertation on the supposed transmission of
Hellenistic astrology to India. His dissertation was supervised by
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr. and
Otto Eduard Neugebauer
Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science who became known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences as they were practiced in ant ...
. 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 research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
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
Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science who became known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences as they were practiced in anti ...
(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
Abraham (Abe) Sachs (1915 – April 22, 1983) was an American Assyriologist. He earned his PhD in Assyriology in 1939 at Johns Hopkins University.
Of note is his collaboration with Otto Neugebauer, whom he met in 1941 when the latter visited t ...
and
Gerald Toomer.
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
The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to ...
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 communit ...
, 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 teach an ...
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 communit ...
, Philadelphia
* 1976: ''Dorothei Sidonii carmen astrologicum'' (Teubner, Leipzig).
* 1978: ''The Yavanajātaka of Sphujidhvaja'' (2 volumes),
Harvard Oriental Series
The ''Harvard Oriental Series'' is a book series founded in 1891 by Charles Rockwell Lanman and Henry Clarke Warren. Lanman served as its inaugural editor (1891-1934) for the first 37 volumes. Other editors of the series include Walter Eugene Clark ...
48
* 1986:''Vettii Valentis Antiocheni Anthologiarum Libri Novem'' (Teubner, Leipzig).
* 1997: (edited with Charles Burnett) ''The Liber Aristotilis of Hugo of Santalla'',
Warburg Institute
The Warburg Institute is a research institution associated with the University of London in central London, England. A member of the School of Advanced Study, its focus is the study of cultural history and the role of images in culture – cros ...
Surveys and Texts 26, London
* 2002: (with
Takanori Kusuba
Takanori (written: 貴教, 貴紀, 貴徳, 貴則, 孝敬, 孝紀, 孝徳, 孝典, 孝憲, 孝法, 孝則, 隆典, 隆則, 陽功, 聖典, 雅男, 崇典 or 鎬則) is a masculine Japanese given name. Notable people with the name include:
*, Japa ...
) ''Arabic Astronomy in Sanskrit: Al-Birjandī on Tadhkira II, Chapter 11 and its Sanskrit Translation'', Brill, Leiden
* 2005: (with
Erica Reiner
Erica Reiner (4 August 1924 – 31 December 2005) was an American Assyriologist and author. From 1974, she was editor of the '' Chicago Assyrian Dictionary'', which was published in 21 volumes over 55 years, being completed in 2011 after her ...
) ''Babylonian Planetary Omens'', Brill, Leiden
* See th
Worldcat listingfor 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
Kim Leslie Plofker (born November 25, 1964) is an American historian of mathematics, specializing in Indian mathematics.
Education and career
Born in Chennai, India, Plofker received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Haverford College. S ...
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