Английская Википедия:Archytas

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Archytas (Шаблон:IPAc-en; Шаблон:Lang-el; 435/410–360/350 BC[1]) was an Ancient Greek mathematician, music theorist,[2] statesman, and strategist from the ancient city of Taras (Tarentum) in Southern Italy. He was a scientist and philosopher affiliated with the Pythagorean school and famous for being the reputed founder of mathematical mechanics and a friend of Plato.[3]

As a Pythagorean, Archytas believed that arithmetic (logistic), rather than geometry, provided the basis for satisfactory proofs,[4] and developed the most famous argument for the infinity of the universe in antiquity.[5]

Life

Archytas was born in Tarentum, a Greek city that was part of Magna Graecia, and was the son of Hestiaeus. He was presumably taught by Philolaus, and taught mathematics to Eudoxus of Cnidus and to Eudoxus' student, Menaechmus.[5]

Politically and militarily, Archytas appears to have been the dominant figure in Tarentum in his generation, somewhat comparable to Pericles in Athens a half-century earlier.[6] The Tarentines elected him strategos ("general") seven years in a row, a step that required them to violate their own rule against successive appointments. Archytas was allegedly undefeated as a general in Tarentine campaigns against their southern Italian neighbors.[7]

In his public career, Archytas had a reputation for virtue as well as efficacy. The Seventh Letter, traditionally attributed to Plato, asserts that Archytas attempted to rescue Plato during his difficulties with Dionysius II of Syracuse.[8] Some scholars have argued that Archytas may have served as one model for Plato's philosopher king, and that he influenced Plato's political philosophy as expressed in The Republic and other works.[5]

Works

Archytas is said to be the first ancient Greek to have spoken of the sciences of arithmetic (logistic), geometry, astronomy, and harmonics as kin, which later became the medieval quadrivium.[9][10] He is thought to have written a number of works in the sciences but only four genuine fragments are extant.[11]

According to Eutocius, Archytas was the first to solve the problem of doubling the cube (the so-called Delian problem) with an ingenious geometric construction.[12][13] Hippocrates of Chios before had reduced this problem to the finding of two mean proportionals, equivalent to the extraction of cube roots. Archytas' demonstration uses lines generated by moving figures to construct the two proportionals between magnitudes and was, according to Diogenes Laërtius, the first in which mechanical motions entered geometry.[14] The topic of proportions, which Archytas seems to have worked on extensively, is treated in book VIII of Euclid's Elements, where the construction for two proportional means can also be found.

Archytas named the harmonic mean, important much later in projective geometry and number theory, though he did not discover it.[15] He proved that ratios of the form (n + 1): n cannot be divided by a mean proportional, an important result in ancient harmonics.[5] Ptolemy considered Archytas the most sophisticated Pythagorean music theorist, and scholars believe Archytas gave a mathematical account of the musical scales used by practicing musicians of his day.[16]

Later tradition regarded Archytas as the founder of mathematical mechanics.[17] Vitruvius includes him in a list of twelve authors who wrote works on mechanics.[18] Thomas Nelson Winter presents evidence that the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems might have been authored by Archytas and later misattributed.[19] As described in the writings of Aulus Gellius five centuries after him, Archytas was reputed to have designed and built some kind of bird-shaped, self-propelled flying device known as the pigeon, said to have flown some 200 meters.[20][21]

Notes

Шаблон:Reflist

References

Further reading

External links

Шаблон:Wikiquote Шаблон:Wikisource author Шаблон:Commons category

Шаблон:Greek schools of philosophy Шаблон:Greek mathematics

Шаблон:Authority control

  1. Philippa Lang, Science: Antiquity and its Legacy, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, p. 154.
  2. Шаблон:Cite encyclopedia Шаблон:Grove Music subscription
  3. Debra Nails, The People of Plato, Шаблон:ISBN, p. 44
  4. Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times Oxford University Press, 1972 p. 49
  5. 5,0 5,1 5,2 5,3 Шаблон:Citation
  6. Шаблон:Cite journal
  7. Шаблон:Cite web
  8. Шаблон:Cite journal
  9. Furner, J. (2021). Classification of the scieces in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Knowledge Organization, 48, 7-8: 499-534. https://www.isko.org/cyclo/greco-roman
  10. Шаблон:Cite book
  11. Horky, P. S. (2021). Archytas: Author and authenticator of Pythagoreanism. In C. Macris, T. Dorandi, & L. Brisson (Eds.), Pythagoras Redivivus: Studies on the Texts Attributed to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. Academia.[2]
  12. Menn, S. (2015). How Archytas doubled the cube. In B. Holmes & K-D Fischer (Eds.), The Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honor of Heinrich von Staden (pp. 407-436).[3]
  13. Шаблон:Cite journal
  14. Plato blamed Archytas for his contamination of geometry with mechanics (Plutarch, Symposiacs, Book VIII, Question 2 ): And therefore Plato himself dislikes Eudoxus, Archytas, and Menaechmus for endeavoring to bring down the doubling the cube to mechanical operations; for by this means all that was good in geometry would be lost and corrupted, it falling back again to sensible things, and not rising upward and considering immaterial and immortal images, in which God being versed is always God.
  15. J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson. Archytas of Tarentum. The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. Visited 11 August 2011.
  16. Шаблон:Cite journal
  17. Шаблон:Harvnb: Vitae philosophorum
  18. Vitruvius, De architectura, vii.14.
  19. Thomas Nelson Winter, "The Mechanical Problems in the Corpus of Aristotle," DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2007.
  20. Aulus Gellius, "Attic Nights", Book X, 12.9 at LacusCurtius
  21. ARCHYTAS OF TARENTUM, Technology Museum of Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece. Шаблон:Webarchive