Pappus of Alexandria (; grc-gre, Πάππος ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς; AD) was one of the last great
Greek mathematician
Greek mathematics refers to mathematics texts and ideas stemming from the Archaic through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, mostly extant from the 7th century BC to the 4th century AD, around the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. Greek mathe ...
s of antiquity known for his ''Synagoge'' (Συναγωγή) or ''Collection'' (),
and for
Pappus's hexagon theorem in
projective geometry. Nothing is known of his life, other than what can be found in his own writings: that he had a son named Hermodorus, and was a teacher in
Alexandria
Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandri ...
.
[Pierre Dedron, J. Itard (1959) ''Mathematics And Mathematicians'', Vol. 1, p. 149 (trans. Judith V. Field) (Transworld Student Library, 1974)]
''Collection'', his best-known work, is a compendium of mathematics in eight volumes, the bulk of which survives. It covers a wide range of topics, including
geometry
Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...
,
recreational mathematics,
doubling the cube,
polygons and
polyhedra.
Context
Pappus was active in the 4th century AD. In a period of general stagnation in mathematical studies, he stands out as a remarkable exception. "How far he was above his contemporaries, how little appreciated or understood by them, is shown by the absence of references to him in other Greek writers, and by the fact that his work had no effect in arresting the decay of mathematical science,"
Thomas Little Heath writes. "In this respect the fate of Pappus strikingly resembles that of
Diophantus."
Dating
In his surviving writings, Pappus gives no indication of the date of the authors whose works he makes use of, or of the time (but see below) when he himself wrote. If no other date information were available, all that could be known would be that he was later than
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy (; grc-gre, Πτολεμαῖος, ; la, Claudius Ptolemaeus; AD) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importanc ...
(died c. 168 AD), whom he quotes, and earlier than
Proclus (born ), who quotes him.
The 10th century ''
Suda
The ''Suda'' or ''Souda'' (; grc-x-medieval, Σοῦδα, Soûda; la, Suidae Lexicon) is a large 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Soudas (Σούδας) or Souida ...
'' states that Pappus was of the same age as
Theon of Alexandria
Theon of Alexandria (; grc, Θέων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς; 335 – c. 405) was a Greek scholar and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He edited and arranged Euclid's '' Elements'' and wrote commentaries on w ...
, who was active in the reign of Emperor
Theodosius I (372–395).
[
] A different date is given by a marginal note to a late 10th-century manuscript (a copy of a chronological table by the same Theon), which states, next to an entry on Emperor
Diocletian (reigned 284–305), that "at that time wrote Pappus".
However, a verifiable date comes from the dating of a solar eclipse mentioned by Pappus himself. In his commentary on the ''
Almagest'' he calculates "the place and time of conjunction which gave rise to the eclipse in
Tybi in 1068 after
Nabonassar". This works out as 18 October 320, and so Pappus must have been active around 320.
Works
The great work of Pappus, in eight books and titled ''Synagoge'' or ''Collection'', has not survived in complete form: the first book is lost, and the rest have suffered considerably. The ''
Suda
The ''Suda'' or ''Souda'' (; grc-x-medieval, Σοῦδα, Soûda; la, Suidae Lexicon) is a large 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Soudas (Σούδας) or Souida ...
'' enumerates other works of Pappus: ''Χωρογραφία οἰκουμενική'' (''
Chorographia oikoumenike'' or ''Description of the Inhabited World''), commentary on the four books of
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy (; grc-gre, Πτολεμαῖος, ; la, Claudius Ptolemaeus; AD) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importanc ...
's ''
Almagest'', ''Ποταμοὺς τοὺς ἐν Λιβύῃ'' (''The Rivers in Libya''), and ''Ὀνειροκριτικά'' (''The Interpretation of Dreams'').
Pappus himself mentions another commentary of his own on the ''Ἀνάλημμα'' (''
Analemma'') of
Diodorus of Alexandria. Pappus also wrote commentaries on
Euclid's
''Elements'' (of which fragments are preserved in
Proclus and the
Scholia, while that on the tenth Book has been found in an Arabic manuscript), and on Ptolemy's ''Ἁρμονικά'' (''Harmonika'').
Federico Commandino translated the ''Collection'' of Pappus into Latin in 1588. The German classicist and mathematical historian Friedrich Hultsch (1833–1908) published a definitive three-volume presentation of Commandino's translation with both the Greek and Latin versions (Berlin, 1875–1878). Using Hultsch's work, the Belgian mathematical historian
Paul ver Eecke Paul-Louis ver Eecke (23 February 1867 – 14 October 1959) was a Belgians, Belgian Mining engineering, mining engineer and History of mathematics, historian of Greek mathematics. He produced influential French language, French translations of the m ...
was the first to publish a translation of the ''Collection'' into a modern European language; his two-volume, French translation has the title ''Pappus d'Alexandrie. La Collection Mathématique.'' (Paris and Bruges, 1933).
''Collection''
The characteristics of Pappus's ''Collection'' are that it contains an account, systematically arranged, of the most important results obtained by his predecessors, and, secondly, notes explanatory of, or extending, previous discoveries. These discoveries form, in fact, a text upon which Pappus enlarges discursively. Heath considered the systematic introductions to the various books as valuable, for they set forth clearly an outline of the contents and the general scope of the subjects to be treated. From these introductions one can judge of the style of Pappus's writing, which is excellent and even elegant the moment he is free from the shackles of mathematical formulae and expressions. Heath also found his characteristic exactness made his ''Collection'' "a most admirable substitute for the texts of the many valuable treatises of earlier mathematicians of which time has deprived us".
The surviving portions of ''Collection'' can be summarized as follows.
We can only conjecture that the lost Book I, like Book II, was concerned with arithmetic, Book III being clearly introduced as beginning a new subject.
The whole of Book II (the former part of which is lost, the existing fragment beginning in the middle of the 14th proposition) discusses a method of multiplication from an unnamed book by
Apollonius of Perga. The final propositions deal with multiplying together the numerical values of Greek letters in two lines of poetry, producing two very large numbers approximately equal to and .
Book III contains geometrical problems, plane and solid. It may be divided into five sections:
# On the famous problem of finding two mean proportionals between two given lines, which arose from that of duplicating the cube, reduced by
Hippocrates of Chios
Hippocrates of Chios ( grc-gre, Ἱπποκράτης ὁ Χῖος; c. 470 – c. 410 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician, geometer, and astronomer.
He was born on the isle of Chios, where he was originally a merchant. After some misadve ...
to the former. Pappus gives several solutions of this problem, including a method of making successive approximations to the solution, the significance of which he apparently failed to appreciate; he adds his own solution of the more general problem of finding geometrically the side of a cube whose content is in any given ratio to that of a given one.
# On the arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means between two straight lines, and the problem of representing all three in one and the same geometrical figure. This serves as an introduction to a general theory of means, of which Pappus distinguishes ten kinds, and gives a table representing examples of each in whole numbers.
# On a curious problem suggested by Euclid I. 21.
# On the inscribing of each of the five regular polyhedra in a sphere. Here Pappus observed that a
regular dodecahedron and a
regular icosahedron could be inscribed in the same sphere such that their vertices all lay on the same 4 circles of latitude, with 3 of the icosahedron's 12 vertices on each circle, and 5 of the dodecahedron's 20 vertices on each circle. This observation has been generalised to higher dimensional
dual polytopes.
# An addition by a later writer on another solution of the first problem of the book.
Of Book IV the title and preface have been lost, so that the program has to be gathered from the book itself. At the beginning is the well-known generalization of Euclid I.47 (
Pappus's area theorem
Pappus's area theorem describes the relationship between the areas of three parallelograms attached to three sides of an arbitrary triangle. The theorem, which can also be thought of as a generalization of the Pythagorean theorem, is named after t ...
), then follow various theorems on the circle, leading up to the problem of the construction of a circle which shall circumscribe three given circles, touching each other two and two. This and several other propositions on contact, e.g. cases of circles touching one another and inscribed in the figure made of three semicircles and known as
arbelos ("shoemakers knife") form the first division of the book; Pappus turns then to a consideration of certain properties of
Archimedes's spiral, the
conchoid of Nicomedes (already mentioned in Book I as supplying a method of doubling the cube), and the curve discovered most probably by
Hippias of Elis
Hippias of Elis (; el, Ἱππίας ὁ Ἠλεῖος; late 5th century BC) was a Greek sophist, and a contemporary of Socrates. With an assurance characteristic of the later sophists, he claimed to be regarded as an authority on all subjects ...
about 420 BC, and known by the name, τετραγωνισμός, or
quadratrix
In geometry, a quadratrix () is a curve having ordinates which are a measure of the area (or quadrature) of another curve. The two most famous curves of this class are those of Dinostratus and E. W. Tschirnhaus, which are both related to the circ ...
. Proposition 30 describes the construction of a curve of double curvature called by Pappus the helix on a sphere; it is described by a point moving uniformly along the arc of a great circle, which itself turns about its diameter uniformly, the point describing a quadrant and the great circle a complete revolution in the same time. The area of the surface included between this curve and its base is found – the first known instance of a quadrature of a curved surface. The rest of the book treats of the
trisection of an angle, and the solution of more general problems of the same kind by means of the quadratrix and spiral. In one solution of the former problem is the first recorded use of the property of a conic (a hyperbola) with reference to the focus and directrix.
In Book V, after an interesting preface concerning regular polygons, and containing remarks upon the
hexagonal form of the cells of honeycombs, Pappus addresses himself to the comparison of the areas of different plane figures which have all the same perimeter (following
Zenodorus's treatise on this subject), and of the volumes of different solid figures which have all the same superficial area, and, lastly, a comparison of the five regular solids of
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
. Incidentally Pappus describes the thirteen other polyhedra bounded by equilateral and equiangular but not similar polygons, discovered by
Archimedes, and finds, by a method recalling that of Archimedes, the surface and volume of a sphere.
According to the preface, Book VI is intended to resolve difficulties occurring in the so-called "Lesser Astronomical Works" (Μικρὸς Ἀστρονοµούµενος), i.e. works other than the ''
Almagest''. It accordingly comments on the ''Sphaerica'' of
Theodosius, the ''Moving Sphere'' of
Autolycus, Theodosius's book on ''Day and Night'', the treatise of
Aristarchus ''
On the Size and Distances of the Sun and Moon'', and Euclid's ''Optics and Phaenomena''.
Book VII
Since
Michel Chasles cited this book of Pappus in his history of geometric methods, it has become the object of considerable attention.
The preface of Book VII explains the terms analysis and synthesis, and the distinction between theorem and problem. Pappus then enumerates works of
Euclid,
Apollonius,
Aristaeus and
Eratosthenes, thirty-three books in all, the substance of which he intends to give, with the lemmas necessary for their elucidation. With the mention of the ''Porisms'' of Euclid we have an account of the relation of
porism to theorem and problem. In the same preface is included (a) the famous problem known by Pappus's name, often enunciated thus: Having given a number of straight lines, to find the geometric locus of a point such that the lengths of the perpendiculars upon, or (more generally) the lines drawn from it obliquely at given inclinations to, the given lines satisfy the condition that the product of certain of them may bear a constant ratio to the product of the remaining ones; (Pappus does not express it in this form but by means of composition of ratios, saying that if the ratio is given which is compounded of the ratios of pairs one of one set and one of another of the lines so drawn, and of the ratio of the odd one, if any, to a given straight line, the point will lie on a curve given in position); (b) the theorems which were rediscovered by and named after
Paul Guldin, but appear to have been discovered by Pappus himself.
Book VII also contains
# under the head of the ''De Sectione Determinata'' of Apollonius, lemmas which, closely examined, are seen to be cases of the involution of six points;
# important lemmas on the ''Porisms'' of Euclid, including what is called
Pappus's hexagon theorem;
# a lemma upon the ''Surface Loci'' of Euclid which states that the locus of a point such that its distance from a given point bears a constant ratio to its distance from a given straight line is a
conic, and is followed by proofs that the conic is a
parabola
In mathematics, a parabola is a plane curve which is mirror-symmetrical and is approximately U-shaped. It fits several superficially different mathematical descriptions, which can all be proved to define exactly the same curves.
One descri ...
,
ellipse, or
hyperbola
In mathematics, a hyperbola (; pl. hyperbolas or hyperbolae ; adj. hyperbolic ) is a type of smooth curve lying in a plane, defined by its geometric properties or by equations for which it is the solution set. A hyperbola has two pieces, ca ...
according as the constant ratio is equal to, less than or greater than 1 (the first recorded proofs of the properties, which do not appear in Apollonius).
Chasles's citation of Pappus was repeated by
Wilhelm Blaschke and
Dirk Struik
Dirk Jan Struik (September 30, 1894 – October 21, 2000) was a Dutch-born American (since 1934) mathematician, historian of mathematics and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the U.S.
Life
Dirk Jan Struik was born in 1 ...
. In Cambridge, England, John J. Milne gave readers the benefit of his reading of Pappus. In 1985 Alexander Jones wrote his thesis at
Brown University on the subject. A revised form of his translation and commentary was published by Springer-Verlag the following year. Jones succeeds in showing how Pappus manipulated the
complete quadrangle, used the relation of
projective harmonic conjugate
In projective geometry, the harmonic conjugate point of an ordered triple of points on the real projective line is defined by the following construction:
:Given three collinear points , let be a point not lying on their join and let any line ...
s, and displayed an awareness of
cross-ratio
In geometry, the cross-ratio, also called the double ratio and anharmonic ratio, is a number associated with a list of four collinear points, particularly points on a projective line. Given four points ''A'', ''B'', ''C'' and ''D'' on a line, t ...
s of points and lines. Furthermore, the concept of
pole and polar is revealed as a lemma in Book VII.
Book VIII
Lastly, Book VIII principally treats mechanics, the properties of the center of gravity, and some mechanical powers. Interspersed are some propositions on pure geometry. Proposition 14 shows how to draw an ellipse through five given points, and Prop. 15 gives a simple construction for the axes of an ellipse when a pair of
conjugate diameters are given.
Legacy
Pappus's ''Collection'' was virtually unknown to the Arabs and medieval Europeans, but exerted great influence on 17th-century mathematics after being translated to Latin by
Federico Commandino. Diophantus's ''Arithmetica'' and Pappus's ''Collection'' were the two major sources of
Viète's ''Isagoge in artem analyticam'' (1591). The Pappus's problem and its generalization led
Descartes to the development of
analytic geometry.
Fermat also developed his version of analytic geometry and his method of Maxima and Minima from Pappus's summaries of Apollonius's lost works ''Plane Loci'' and ''On Determinate Section''. Other mathematicians influenced by Pappus were
Pacioli,
da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 14522 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on h ...
,
Kepler
Johannes Kepler (; ; 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws o ...
,
van Roomen,
Pascal
Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name
* Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name
** Blaise Pascal, Frenc ...
,
Newton,
Bernoulli,
Euler,
Gauss,
Gergonne,
Steiner and
Poncelet.
[AIP Conference Proceedings 1479, 9 (2012); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4756049]
See also
*
Pappus's hexagon theorem
*
Pappus's centroid theorem
*
Pappus chain
In geometry, the Pappus chain is a ring of circles between two tangent circles investigated by Pappus of Alexandria in the 3rd century AD.
Construction
The arbelos is defined by two circles, ''C''U and ''C''V, which are tangent at the point A a ...
*
Pappus configuration
In geometry, the Pappus configuration is a configuration of nine points and nine lines in the Euclidean plane, with three points per line and three lines through each point.
History and construction
This configuration is named after Pappus of A ...
*
Pappus graph
Notes
References
*
*
**
*
Attribution:
*
Further reading
*
*
*
External links
Pappos(Bibliotheca Augustana)
*
"Pappus" ''Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia'', Sixth Edition at Answer.com.
at MathPages
Pappus's work on the Isoperimetric Problema
Convergence
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pappus of Alexandria
Roman-era Alexandrians
Ancient Greek geometers
4th-century writers
290s births
350s deaths
Year of birth unknown
Year of death unknown
4th-century mathematicians