Reviel Netz

Last updated
Reviel Netz
רויאל נץ
Netz headshot.jpg
Born (1968-01-02) January 2, 1968 (age 56)
Alma mater Tel Aviv University
Scientific career
Fields Philologist, historian, philosopher
Institutions Stanford University

Reviel Netz (born January 2, 1968) is an Israeli scholar of the history of pre-modern mathematics, who is currently a professor of classics and of philosophy at Stanford University.

Contents

Life and work

Netz was born January 2, 1968, in Tel Aviv, Israel to Israeli author Corinna Hasofferett  [ he ] and Yoel Netz, a translator of Russian classics.

From 1983 to 1992, Netz studied at the Tel Aviv University, obtaining a B.A. in Ancient History and an M.A. in History and the Philosophy of Science; from 1993 to 1995 studied classics at Christ College, Cambridge University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1995. From 1996 to 1999 Netz worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and concurrently in 1998 and 1999 worked as a post-doctoral fellow at MIT. In the fall of 1999 he took a position as an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Classics, where he has continued to teach and publish today. [1] [2]

Netz is married to Maya Arad, an Israeli writer who is widely considered "the foremost Hebrew writer outside Israel". [3] The couple has two daughters.

Netz's major research interests include the wider issues of the history of cognitive practices; for example the history of the book, visual culture, literacy and numeracy. He is the author of a number of works in field, including volumes I and II of The Archimedes Palimpsest . He also co-authored The Archimedes Codex with William Noel on the same subject matter, but oriented towards a public audience which received the Neumann Prize, [4] as well as several works published by the Cambridge University Press, including The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: a Study in Cognitive History (1999, Runciman Award), The Transformation of Early Mediterranean Mathematics: From Problems to Equations (2004), Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (2009), "Scale, Space, and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture" (2020), and "A New History of Greek Mathematics" (2022).

In 2014 he was awarded the Commandino Medal at the Urbino University for his contributions to the history of science.

Netz has also appeared as a subject matter expert on PBS's Nova concerning ancient mathematics. [5]

In addition to his work on the history of mathematics, Netz has published some Hebrew poetry, including "Adayin Baḥutz" in 1999 as well as "Quatrains" in 2014.

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archimedes</span> Greek mathematician and physicist (c.287–c.212 BC)

Archimedes of Syracuse was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Considered the greatest mathematician of ancient history, and one of the greatest of all time, Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying the concept of the infinitely small and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems. These include the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, the area of an ellipse, the area under a parabola, the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution, the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution, and the area of a spiral.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Euclid</span> Ancient Greek mathematician (fl. 300 BC)

Euclid was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the Elements treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely dominated the field until the early 19th century. His system, now referred to as Euclidean geometry, involved new innovations in combination with a synthesis of theories from earlier Greek mathematicians, including Eudoxus of Cnidus, Hippocrates of Chios, and Theaetetus. With Archimedes and Apollonius of Perga, Euclid is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, and one of the most influential in the history of mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isidore of Miletus</span> Byzantine Greek architect

Isidore of Miletus was one of the two main Byzantine Greek mathematician, physicist and architects that Emperor Justinian I commissioned to design the cathedral Hagia Sophia in Constantinople from 532 to 537. He was born c. 475 AD. The creation of an important compilation of Archimedes' works has been attributed to him. The spurious Book XV from Euclid's Elements has been partly attributed to Isidore of Miletus.

The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Israelites. The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, written in the Koine Greek language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Palimpsest</span> Reused manuscript with visible prior text

In textual studies, a palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin and was expensive and not readily available, so, in the interest of economy, a page was often re-used by scraping off the previous writing. In colloquial usage, the term palimpsest is also used in architecture, archaeology and geomorphology to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another; for example, a monumental brass the reverse blank side of which has been re-engraved.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ptolemy</span> 2nd-century Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer

Claudius Ptolemy was an Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day. This is sometimes known as the Apotelesmatika but more commonly known as the Tetrábiblos, from the Koine Greek meaning "Four Books", or by its Latin equivalent Quadripartite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahweh</span> Ancient Levantine deity

Yahweh was an ancient Levantine deity, and national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Though no consensus exists regarding the deity's origins, scholars generally contend that Yahweh emerged as a "divine warrior" associated first with Seir, Edom, Paran and Teman, and later with Canaan. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age, if not somewhat earlier.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archimedes Palimpsest</span> Greek parchment codex manuscript

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, originally a Byzantine Greek copy of a compilation of Archimedes and other authors. It contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost and the only surviving original Greek edition of his work On Floating Bodies. The first version of the compilation is believed to have been produced by Isidorus of Miletus, the architect of the geometrically complex Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople, sometime around AD 530. The copy found in the palimpsest was created from this original, also in Constantinople, during the Macedonian Renaissance, a time when mathematics in the capital was being revived by the former Greek Orthodox bishop of Thessaloniki Leo the Geometer, a cousin of the Patriarch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Heath (classicist)</span> British civil servant, mathematician and classicist (1861–1940)

Sir Thomas Little Heath was a British civil servant, mathematician, classical scholar, historian of ancient Greek mathematics, translator, and mountaineer. He was educated at Clifton College. Heath translated works of Euclid of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga, Aristarchus of Samos, and Archimedes of Syracuse into English.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saint Catherine's Monastery</span> Greek Orthodox monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, Egypt

Saint Catherine's Monastery (Arabic: دير القدّيسة كاترين Dayr al-Qiddīsa Katrīn; Greek: Μονὴ τῆς Ἁγίας Αἰκατερίνης, officially the Sacred Autonomous Royal Monastery of Saint Catherine of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai, is a Christian monastery located in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Located at the foot of Mount Sinai, it was built between 548 and 565, and is the world's oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greek mathematics</span> Mathematics of Ancient Greeks

Greek mathematics refers to mathematics texts and ideas stemming from the Archaic through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, mostly from the late 7th century BC to the 6th century AD, around the shores of the Mediterranean. Greek mathematicians lived in cities spread over the entire region, from Anatolia to Italy and North Africa, but were united by Greek culture and the Greek language. The development of mathematics as a theoretical discipline and the use of deductive reasoning in proofs is an important difference between Greek mathematics and those of preceding civilizations.

A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures to huge polyglot codices containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.

Eutocius of Ascalon was a Greek mathematician who wrote commentaries on several Archimedean treatises and on the Apollonian Conics.

Dionysodorus of Caunus was an ancient Greek mathematician.

<i>Ostomachion</i> Treatise on geometry attributed to Archimedes

In ancient Greek geometry, the Ostomachion, also known as loculus Archimedius or syntomachion, is a mathematical treatise attributed to Archimedes. This work has survived fragmentarily in an Arabic version and a copy, the Archimedes Palimpsest, of the original ancient Greek text made in Byzantine times.

Maya Arad is an American-based Israeli writer. She is generally considered the "foremost Hebrew writer outside Israel".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ezra 10</span> A chapter in the Book of Ezra

Ezra 10 is the tenth and final chapter of the Book of Ezra in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, or the tenth chapter of the book of Ezra-Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible, which treats the book of Ezra and book of Nehemiah as one book. Jewish tradition states that Ezra is the author of Ezra-Nehemiah as well as the Book of Chronicles, but modern scholars generally accept that a compiler from the 5th century BCE is the final author of these books. The section comprising chapters 7 to 10 mainly describes the activities of Ezra the scribe and the priest. This chapter and the previous one deal with the problem of intermarriage, especially the solution of it, ending with a list of those who sent away their "foreign" wives and children; a somber note which finds relief in the Book of Nehemiah, as the continuation of the Book of Ezra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2 Chronicles 10</span> Second Book of Chronicles, chapter 10

2 Chronicles 10 is the tenth chapter of the Second Book of Chronicles the Old Testament in the Christian Bible or of the second part of the Books of Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible. The book is compiled from older sources by an unknown person or group, designated by modern scholars as "the Chronicler", and had the final shape established in late fifth or fourth century BCE. This chapter belongs to the section focusing on the kingdom of Judah until its destruction by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar and the beginning of restoration under Cyrus the Great of Persia. The focus of this chapter is the kingdom of Israel's division in the beginning of Rehoboam's reign.

David Asheri, born David Bonaventura, was an Italian-Israeli historian. Asheri is regarded as "one of the most distinguished scholars of ancient Greece". He is perhaps best known for his many contributions to the scholarship of Herodotus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A History of Greek Mathematics</span>

A History of Greek Mathematics is a book by English historian of mathematics Thomas Heath about history of Greek mathematics. It was published in Oxford in 1921, in two volumes titled Volume I, From Thales to Euclid and Volume II, From Aristarchus to Diophantus. It got positive reviews and is still used today. Ten years later, in 1931, Heath published A Manual of Greek Mathematics, a concise version of the two-volume History.

References