The language of the ``Givens'': its forms and its use as a deductive tool in Greek mathematics (Q532570): Difference between revisions

A detailed lexical and syntactic analysis of the expressions used in classical Greek mathematics to describe not only data (of problems or premisses of theorems) but also entities (magnitudes, geometric figures) which are uniquely determined by the initial data. An interesting result is that Greek mathematicians used presence or absence of the definite article to distinguish between data and uniquely determined results. \{A comparison of the author's lexical determination with the corresponding entries in Liddell-Scott's great dictionary shows that the latter is quite correct in its treatment of mathematical terms.\} The paper is a valuable help to future translators of Greek mathematical texts.