David Pingree

This article is about the professor at Brown University. For the merchant and landowner, see David Pingree (merchant).

David Edwin Pingree (January 2, 1933 – November 11, 2005) was an American historian of mathematics in the ancient world. 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, 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. After completing his PhD, Pingree remained at Harvard for three more years as a member of its Society of Fellows before moving to the University of Chicago 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 in Brown's History of Mathematics Department (which Neugebauer established in 1947), Pingree numbered among his colleagues men of extraordinary learning, including Abraham Sachs and Gerald Toomer.

Career

Jon McGinnis of the University of Missouri, St. Louis, describes Pingree's life-work thus:

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 in 1975 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, he was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Advanced Study; he was also A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 1995.

Selected works

  • 1968: Albumasaris de revolutionibus nativitatum (Teubner, Leipzig).
  • 1970: Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit (5 volumes) American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
  • 1973: Hephaestionis Thebani Apotelesmaticorum libri III (vol. I; Teubner, Leipzig).
  • 1974: Hephaestionis Thebani Apotelesmaticorum epitomae IV (vol. II; Teubner, Leipzig).
  • 1976: Dorothei Sidonii carmen astrologicum (Teubner, Leipzig).
  • 1978: The Yavanajātaka of Sphujidhvaja (2 volumes) (Harvard Oriental Series 48).
  • 1986: Vettii Valentis Antiocheni Anthologiarum Libri IX (Teubner, Leipzig).
  • 1997: (edited with Charles Burnett) The Liber Aristotilis of Hugo of Santalla (Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 26, London).
  • 2002: (with Takanori Kusuba) Arabic Astronomy in Sanskrit: Al-Birjandī on Tadhkira II, Chapter 11 and its Sanskrit Translation (Brill, Leiden).
  • 2005: (with Erica Reiner) Babylonian Planetary Omens (Brill, Leiden).
  • 2007: Rhetorius qui dictur: Compendium astrologicum: Libri Vi et VI (Berlin, Walter de Gruyter).
  • See the Worldcat listing for further titles.
Articles in dictionaries and encyclopedias

References

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