Having trouble viewing this email? View an online version http://hps.createsend1.com/t/r/e/tyduidl/xdrwyuty/b/ HISTORY &
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Dear HP Monday 22nd August Clemency Montelle (Canterbury) "Hypsicles of Alexandria and his "little" work on rising times". The determination of rising times for the twelve zodiacal signs at a given terrestrial latitude was a challenge for ancient mathematicians and astronomers and many attempts to model these were proposed in antiquity based on the leading mathematical theories and techniques ofthe day. An important early approach was put forth by the Alexandrianmathematician Hypsicles (fl. ca. first half of second century BCE)in a work called the Anaphorica who based his solution on the assumption that rising times increase and decrease strictly linearlywith constant difference. Indeed, in an era when the overwhelmingsuccess of Ptolemy's mathematical Syntaxis ensured the redundancy ofalmost all works that predated it, Hypsicles's work is not onlysignificant because of the fact that it is a rare glimpse into earlyGreek mathematical astronomy but also because it invokes some elegantarithmetical mathematical lemmas to solve a practical problem in ascene that was dominated by geometrical ways of thinking. SCIENCE MEETING ROOM 450 CARSLAW BUILDING - CAMPERDOWN CAMPUS 6PM - 7.30PM HPS WEBSITE [http://sydney.edu.au/science/hps/] SCIENCE NEWS [http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/science/] EMAIL US [mailto:[email protected]] FORWARD TO A FRIEND http://hps.forwardtomyfriend.com/r/xdrwyuty/918A8176/tyduidl/l/n [http://style=] To make sure you continue to see our emails in the future, please add [[email protected]] [mailto:[email protected]] to your address book or safe senders list Disclaimer [http://sydney.edu.au/disclaimer.shtml] | Privacy statement [http://sydney.edu.au/privacy.shtml]| University of Sydney [http://sydney.edu.au/] | Unsubscribe http://hps.createsend1.com/t/r/u/tyduidl/xdrwyuty/p/
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