WilbourHall.org

- In Memory of the History of Mathematics Department at Brown University-

Left: Dr. Otto Neugebauer Right: Dr. David Pingree

"Arguably [Dr.] Pingree is the greatest classical scholar to graduate from Harvard College in the twentieth century."- William Calder III

Some Texts Available for Download

Euclid	Ptolemy(Almagest)	Proclus	Al-Nairizi	Al-Khazini
Pappus	Diophantus	Archimedes	Apollonius	Geminus
Nichomachus	Autolycus	Aristarchus	Surya Siddhanta	Brahma-Sphuta-Siddhanta
Aryabhatiya	Vrddhayavanjataka	Panini- Kashika, Mahabhashya

Goals of this Site

• To make available public domain and "open source" materials that are essential for the study of ancient mathematics and mathematical astrononmy. Google has done some things to achieve this through its books.google.com project. However, like most other efforts at digitally copying non digital materials, "mistakes were made". For example, Google currently has several (all incomplete) versions of Teubner's's edition of Euclid available for download. Most of these unfortunately contain page after page that are illegible, missing, out of order or otherwise unusable.

  • Most of the works available here were made by repairing the imperfect Google scans. This repairing has taken the form of replacing illegible or missing pages of one Google text with readable pages from another Google scan of the same text, splicing together readable portions of pages with Photoshop, replacing missing pages with scans from a local library, and replacing missing pages with transcriptions in TeX, a mathematical typesetting software, from copies that are too brittle to scan.

• To seek the cooperation of others in obtaining scans of unreadable/missing pages of the ancient scientific works that are now available from Google, the Million Books Project, the Digital Library of India and elsewhere.

• To give lists, by language, of books and other resources used by the Department and its students.

• To welcome any and all suggestions for the improvement of this site. If you have any constructive suggestions, would like to donate time or scans to this project, notice errors in the PDFs that I missed or that I introduced, please contact me at

MOTD

June 19, 2008 3:04 PM 200

• Thanks to the file compression capabilities of Adobe Acrobat 8, Heiberg's Greek edition of the Almagest is ready for distribution. Using this feature of Acrobat, I was able to reduce the file size for the two volume set from over 100 Mb to about 17 Mb with only a minor loss in quality. The scans of the Almagest distributed here are not part of the Google project. Google's scans of the Almagest are, quite frankly, horrendous and unuseable. The best of them contain dozens of unreadable or missing pages.( I am, however, considering "repairing" them with my own scans, time permitting).

  • The scans released here were made from a set of photocopies I made of the Almagest over 10 years ago. As noted on the first page of the PDF, there are some places in volume I, part I, that are hard to read. I have provided TeX transciptions of those places made from the original photocopies, which are clearer than the scans presented here. The marginalia are most likely those of the late Dr. David Pingree, at whose request these photocopies were made. The free Adobe Acrobat reader version 8 is required to view the Almagest

     

• I am releasing - under the GNU Verbatim License - my own transcription of books 10 - 12 of Al- Khazini's epitome of his Zij as-Sanjari (with other books to follow in due course). It is not without errors. I have indicated places where I was unable to read the manuscripts with either a question mark or the word "help" . I attempted to collate two manuscripts for this transcription:

  • Manuscript A1 is number 859 of the Hamadiye collection in the Suleymaniye Library in Istanbul

  • Manuscript A2 is number 682 in the library of the Sipashalar Mosque in Teheran.

• (Oct 11, 2007) The Million Books Project seems to be in the process of scanning some of the Greek mathematical texts. They are far superior in quality to those produced by Google. The ones I have seen have crystal-clear images and no missing pages. I have added links below to the following texts at the Million Books Project

  • Heiberg's Almagest Part I (part II is not yet available)
  • Heath's books on Diophantus, Archimedes and Aristarchus of Samos
  • The works of Nicomachus and Autolycus
    

     

• "Let a thousand flowers bloom"
  • Over 13,000 copies of Euclid Volume I have been downloaded.
  • Over 4,000 copies of Heiberg's Almagest have been dowloaded.
  • These pdfs now reside in places such as the US (Washington, DC - Bureau of the Census, the Pentagon, Federal Trade Commision, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; California - Los Angeles, Universal City, Hayward, Berkeley, Adobe Systems, Google, Cal State Long Beach, San Jose; Virginia - Manassas, Alexandria; Idaho; Illinois - the University of Illinois at Chicago, Champaign-Urbana; Mass -Brookline;Florida - Miami; Georgia - Athens; Oklahoma - University of Oklahoma Broken Arrow; New Mexico: NASA; Rhode Island - Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Brown University, Providence; Kansas - Leavenworth), Morocco (Rabat), Poland (Warszawa, Lublin, Krakw, Lodz, Bialystok,Gdansk),Mexico(Huixquilucan), Oman (Ruwi), Romania (Gherla,Suceava,Galati,Bucharest), Israel (Even Yehuda, Tel Aviv, Bet Shemesh, Haifa, Bat Yam, Lod, Jerusalem), Croatia (Zagreb), Finland (Oulu,University of Helsinki,Vantaa), Columbia(Medelln),Vietnam (Hanoi),Bolivia (La Paz), Peru (Lima), The Phillipines(Quezon City, Manila), Nigeria (Lagos), Jamaica (Kingston), Albania(Tiran),Tunisia,Turkey (Trk, Ankara, Izmir, Istanbul),Canada (Quebec, the city of Regina in Saskatchewan, University of Toronto, Montreal,Memorial University of Newfoundland, Halifax [Nova Scotia],Calgary ) the UK (Wembley, Oxford University, Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, London, Exeter, Exeter University, London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University,East Wemyss), India (Bangalore, New Dehli,Pune,Hyderabad), ), Ireland (Dublin, Kilkenny), Costa Rica (San Jose), Pakistan (Islamabad, Lahore in Punjab), Latvia (Kuldiga, Riga), Iraq, Lithuania (Vilnius, Kaunas Technological University), Syria,Chile (Santiago), Macedonia(Skopje), Prague, Japan (Tokyo, Nagano,Hokkaido,Yokohama City University,Sendai,Miyagi,Narashino,Sapporo,Sasaguri,Fukuoka,Funabashi), Trinidad and Tobago ( Chaguanas), Belgium (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Gent, Kortenburg, Kitakyushu), Belarus (Minsk), (Ankaran, Nova Gorica,Polzela,Trbovlje), Panama (Cocol),Spain (Canary Islands, Andalucia,La Arguea, Corrubedo, Universitat de Barcelona, Madrid,Oviedo,La Orotava), the Philippines(Ebaiu) , Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur,Kuching), Bulgaria(Sofia), Mexico (Acapulco), Peurto Rico (University of Puerto Rico), Slovakia(Bratislava,Ruzomberok), Iran (Tehran), Jordan (Amman),Bahrain (Manama), the Czech Republic (Kralupy Nad Vltavou, Prague), Sri Lanka, Thailand (Bangkok), China (Qingdao, Beijing, Hong Kong, Zhengzhou University,Shanghai, the Baidu spider, Heilongjiang [Harbin], Nanjing), Indonesia(Surabaya, Jakarta),Brazil (Salvador,Rio de Janeiro, ), Italy (Universita' degli Studi di Udine,Scuola, Verona, Milan, Venice - Istituto Universitario di Architettura , atque altae moenia Romae), Greece (Thessalonki, Athens, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,Xanthi), El Salvador (Antiguo Cuscatln), Taiwan (Yanlin, Taipei), Suriname (Paramaribo), Australia (Tasmania, Perth, New South Wales, Melbourne, Latrobe University, Sydney, Brisbane), New Zealand (Auckland,Christchurch), Serbia (Belgrade), Kuwait, Norway (Bergen, Oslo,Trondheim,Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Estonia (Tallinn,Tartu), the Ukraine (NovoPoznyaki, Kiev), Georgia (Tbilisi), Portugal (Setba, Prime, Lisbon, ), Hungary (Budapest, Kaposvr), New Jersey (the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, Newark, Jersey City Public Library), the Russian Federation (Ufa,Tula,Novosibirsk,Moscow, Irkutsk, St. Petersburg), Saudi Arabia (Jeddah,Al Hudud ash Shamaliyah [Lne], Riyadh), the Netherlands (Kesteren, Capelle Aan Den IJssel, Universiteit Utrecht, Haarlem), Sweden (Stockholm,Gvle,Forsby,Gteborg,Helsingborg, Linkping), Austria (Graz, Innsbruck, Vienna), South Korea (Seoul,Anyang,Suwon,Seocho, Ilsan), South Africa (Parow,Cape Town,Pretoria), Solvenia(Ljubljana), Switzerland (Zurich, Universita della Svizzera italiana ), Malta (Birkirkara), Hawaii (Honolulu), Germany ( Eislingen, Sindelfingen,Ganderkesee Berlin, Baltenstein, Bonn, Gunzenhausen, Eschborn, Koeln, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum,Kiel, Babetsberg, Karlsruhe,Ganderkesee, Fernreuth, Universitaet Hamburg,Steinen,Chemnitz), Cyprus (Limassol,Nicosia), Denmark(Copenhagen, Alle, Billund,Hjortshj), United Arab Emirates (Dubai, American University of Sharjah, Abu Dhabi), France (Paris, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, Laboratoire d'Automatique et d'Analyse des Systeme, Strasbourg, Nancy,Blois,Toulouse), Egypt (The American University of Cairo, Cairo) , Venezuela (Caracas), Argentina (Buenos Aires),Luxembourg (Walferdange),Maldives(Male), Brunei Darussalam(Bandar Seri Begawan), Faroe Islands (Trshavn), Singapore (Dakar),Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo), Mauritius, Sicily (Corleone), Iceland (Icelandic Ministry of Education), Texas (Garland), Nepal (Kathmandu) and the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens (Flushing, Astoria, Jamaica), Staten Island and the Bronx in New York City .

Long Term Goals

• Geminus' Elementa Astronomiae is now available from books.google.com. Pages 111 and 112 were missing in the original, and page 121 was illegible. I replaced pages 111, 112 and 121 with digital images. I mistakenly did not insert page 121 until February 9th, 2008. If you downloaded this work before that date, please delete your old copy and replace it with the one available above. My apologies.

• The Surya Siddhanta with the Sauravasana Tika from the Digital Library of India is missing page 96. If anyone has a scan of this page, would you please be so kind as to send me a copy?

• I was able to mirror most of the content of the Sansknet.org website before its servers went dark several years ago.This site contained a treasure of digitized Sanskrit texts.I am hoping to make some of this material available again as PDF files in the coming months

Thank you for your time and for visiting my site.