This document provides an introduction to Book 7 of Pappus's Collection, known as the "Domain of Analysis". It explains that analysis was a method in ancient Greek geometry that worked backwards from a desired conclusion, assuming it was true and deriving logical steps, to help discover proofs or constructions. It distinguishes between analysis of theorems, which aimed to determine the validity of statements, and analysis of problems, which aimed to construct specified objects from given data. The document provides examples of each type of analysis from Pappus and discusses their differing levels of cogency and reversibility into synthetic proofs or constructions.
(Sources in The History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences 8) Alexander Jones (Auth.), Alexander Jones (Eds.) - Pappus of Alexandria Book 7 of The Collection - Part 2
This document provides an introduction to Book 7 of Pappus's Collection, known as the "Domain of Analysis". It explains that analysis was a method in ancient Greek geometry that worked backwards from a desired conclusion, assuming it was true and deriving logical steps, to help discover proofs or constructions. It distinguishes between analysis of theorems, which aimed to determine the validity of statements, and analysis of problems, which aimed to construct specified objects from given data. The document provides examples of each type of analysis from Pappus and discusses their differing levels of cogency and reversibility into synthetic proofs or constructions.
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(Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences 8) Alexander Jones (auth.), Alexander Jones (eds.) - Pappus of Alexandria Book 7 of the Collection_ Part 1.
This document provides an introduction to Book 7 of Pappus's Collection, known as the "Domain of Analysis". It explains that analysis was a method in ancient Greek geometry that worked backwards from a desired conclusion, assuming it was true and deriving logical steps, to help discover proofs or constructions. It distinguishes between analysis of theorems, which aimed to determine the validity of statements, and analysis of problems, which aimed to construct specified objects from given data. The document provides examples of each type of analysis from Pappus and discusses their differing levels of cogency and reversibility into synthetic proofs or constructions.
This document provides an introduction to Book 7 of Pappus's Collection, known as the "Domain of Analysis". It explains that analysis was a method in ancient Greek geometry that worked backwards from a desired conclusion, assuming it was true and deriving logical steps, to help discover proofs or constructions. It distinguishes between analysis of theorems, which aimed to determine the validity of statements, and analysis of problems, which aimed to construct specified objects from given data. The document provides examples of each type of analysis from Pappus and discusses their differing levels of cogency and reversibility into synthetic proofs or constructions.
§ 18. The Domain of Analysis. Book 7 of the Collection is a
companion to several geometrical treatises, which by Pappus's time were alotted to a special branch of mathematics, the a.vaAv Oil e v 0 ú = T 071' 0 ú = , or 'Domain of Analysis'.1 62 These books were supposed to equip the geometer with a "special resource" enabling him to solve geometrical problems. More precisely, they were to help him in a particular kind of mathematical argument called 'analysis'. The nature of Greek geometrical analysis has been the subject of an enormous philosophical and metamathematical literature, to which I am reluctant to add. 1 6 3 The following remarks are meant only as a description of analysis as it actually occurs in Pappus and other ancient texts, and to show the application of the "Domain of Analysis" to it. In ancient geometry 'analysis' had none of its modern connotations, but referred to a kind of reversal of the normal 'synthetic' method of proof or construction. Synthesis began with assumed abstract objects and statements about them, and, by a series of steps conventionally admitted to be valid, eventually arrived at a desired conclusion: the validity of an assertion in a 'theorem', the construction of a specified object in a 'problem'. A synthetic proof of any but the simplest propositions might be difficult to discover directly, so that as a preliminary approach it would be advantageous to work backwards from the goal, on the supposition that the order of the steps could be reversed to produce a valid synthesis of the proposition.
162 See the notes to 7.1.
163 One recent paper, Mahoney [1968], is notable, in spite of several
misconceptions, for its refreshing emphasis on analysis as a mathematicians' tool rather than philosophical method, and for its bibliographical references. A more promising line of investigation than the meticulous hermeneusis of the same few passages in Greek authors (Pappus, Marinus, the scholiast to Elements XIII) might be the reception and development of Greek analysis by Arabic mathematicians, of which there survive copious theoretical discussions and examples in practice that have yet to be studied. § 18 The Domain of Analysis 67
Pappus draws (in 7.2) an important distinction between the analysis
of theorems (propositions in which the validity of an assertion is to be determined) and the analysis of problems (propositions requiring the construction of a described object from various data). Actual examples of 'theorematical' analysis in ancient texts are not numerous: they include a well known series of analyses of the first five propositions in Book 13 of the Elements inserted into the transmitted text at some time after Euclid,l 6 4 and some instances in Pappus, for example 7.225, .226, .231, and .321 in Book 7. As these show, analysis as applied to theorems was a comparatively naive technique using the same kinds of logical steps as synthetic proof, but beginning with the assumption of that which is to be proved, and advancing until a conclusion is reached thatis known to be true (or false) independently of the assumption. Consequently the technique guarantees neither the correctness of the proposition nor the possibility of obtaining a valid proof by inverting the steps of the argument. For example, in 7.321 the proposition is indeed correct, but the analysis that apparently verifies it is not reversible, a circumstance that explains Pappus's difficulties in attempting a synthesis of the proposition in 7.319. However, if the analysis arrives at a conclusion independently known to be false, or inconsistent with the assumption, then it is a valid disproof by reductio ad absurdum, and requires no inversion; such proofs are, of course, well attested. In contrast to their counterpart for theorems, analyses of problems are very common in Greek treatises. There seem to have been two reasons for this fact: first, there existed an expandable repertory of operations that were reversible as steps in geometrical construction (so that the analysis of a problem had a degree of cogency lacking in theorematic analysis); and secondly, an analysis could yield information about the conditions of possibility and number of solutions of a problem, the determination of which, or 'diorism', was an essential part of a complete solution of a problem. Essential to the analysis of problems was the concept of being 'given', which was applied both to those objects that are assumed at the beginning of a problem, and to any other objects that are determined by the assumptions. The word 'given' had a wide range of mathematical connotations in antiquity, 1 65 but the most common meanings were 'assumed', 'determined', and 'determined and constructible'. The distinction between the second and third arises only in problems, such as the trisection
1 64 Euclid, Opera vol. 4 pp. 364-76.
1 6 5 They are discussed, rather confusingly, by Marinus (fifth century
A.D.) in his introduction to Euclid's Data (Euclid, Opera vol. 6 pp. 234-57).
(Sources in The History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences 8) Alexander Jones (Auth.), Alexander Jones (Eds.) - Pappus of Alexandria Book 7 of The Collection - Part 2