Aristarchus's on the sizes and distances of the sun and the moon: Greek and Arabic texts (Q884936)

One of the most inventive and seemingly advanced texts of classical Greek mathematics has heretofore lacked a detailed and well-rounded modern commentary. The most substantial previous account is that in \textit{T. L. Heath}'s 1913 edition [\textit{Aristarchus} of Samos: the ancient \textit{Copernicus}, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1913; JFM 44.0056.04)] which is still a useful resource. This lacuna has been effectively filled by the present paper which provides an analysis of the text, an account of its Arabic transmission, and an indication of its importance for understanding areas of mathematics beyond Euclid, its close contemporary. Aristarchus uses a combination of rigorous methods and approximative, and even contradictory, assumptions to lead to knowledge about astronomical objects. O. Neugebauer in 1975 [A history of ancient mathematical astronomy. In 3 parts. Berlin et al.: Springer (1975; Zbl 0323.01002)] studied mainly the astronomical aspects; the present paper looks more to the purely mathematical. Included are an analysis of the logical structure and a detailed analysis of Proposition 4. One of the new insights that the authors argue for is that inequalities (between parts) and ratio inequalities are effectively interchangeable in Aristarchus's view. The authors give attention to the role of hypotheses (most famously the heliocentric) in Aristarchus's work in general as brought out by Archimedes in his \textit{Sand Reckoner}. Two Arabic versions are compared with the Greek: the ninth-century one of Thābit ibn Qurra and the more common one by al-Ṭūsī of the thirteenth century. A context is given for why Thābit's version can be regarded as an improvement of the original Greek text.