Courtney Roby
Biographic Data
| ID | 1116368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Courtney Roby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Courtney |
| FAMILY NAME | Roby |
| SIGNATURE | ROBY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9652-0614 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria was a figure of great importance not only for ancient technology but also for the medieval and early modern traditions that drew on his work. In this book Courtney Roby presents Hero's key strategies for developing, solving, and contextualizing technical problems, not only in his own lifetime but as an influential tradition of creating accessible technical treatises spanning multiple disciplines. While Hero's historical biograp…
Archimedes for the rest of us
For Archimedes’ work to have furnished the ‘key theoretical tools’ for the scientific revolution, the texts must have been comprehensible to early modern readers. Yet as Archimedes’ readers and commentators have observed for centuries, his work can be very difficult going indeed. In this chapter, I explore how commentaries and other explanatory texts, like Guidobaldo dal Monte’s 1588 ‘paraphrase’ commentary to Archimedes’ Planes in Equilibrium, c…
Cycles de la nature, cycles de l’histoire
This volume of essays represents the fruit of an ambitious project driven by two working groups (Sociétés, milieux, climats and Normes et représentations du pouvoir) of the Centre de Recherche en Archéologie, Archéosciences, Histoire at Le Mans Université. Reviewed by: Courtney Roby, Published Online (2021-08-31)Copyright © 2021 by Courtney RobyThis open access publication is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriva…
Geometer, in a Landscape
In this paper, I will use recent work on embodied cognition to analyze the techniques Hero uses to embody the imposition of mathematical constructions on the physical world in his Dioptra, a text on surveying. Hero shifts geometrical objects, and techniques for manipulating them, into the real world by invoking material attributes that purely geometrical objects do not possess. This shift, in turn, demands an innovative restructuring of conceptua…
A Portable Cosmos
Reviewed by: A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World by Alexander Jones Courtney Roby Alexander Jones. A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 288. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-19-973934-9. The astronomical computer known as the Antikythera Mechanism is of course no stranger to the attentions of bo…
Gods and Robots
BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 371 For example, attentive and exhaustive reading of the poems reveals that the gods sometimes appear to live on a mountain and sometimes in the sky. Since Homer is assumed to be internally consistent, some explanation is required, and this requirement motivates a striking point in Aristarchus’ view of Homeric cosmology: Homer’s Olympus is a very tall mountain reaching above the clouds into the aether or heaven (324–32…
Framing Technologies in Hero and Ptolemy
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Latin Didactic, Scientific, and Technical Literature
Roman authors developed a rich and creative literature in Latin on a wide range of scientific and technical subjects, intended for a variety of readerships and spanning many different genres, including didactic poetry, as well as technical prose. This essay discusses literature in Latin that sought to illuminate the natural world for its readers or instruct them in manipulating it. Particular focus is placed on the problems of identifying and cla…
Seneca's Scientific Fictions
Seneca's Naturales Quaestiones explains the causes and functional mechanisms of natural phenomena, from common sights like rainbows to exotically out-of-reach ones like comets. The vividness with which he brings them all within the reader's grasp is certainly a literary feat as much as a scientific one, but the rhetorical power of his explanations does not cost them their epistemological validity. Analyses drawn from current philosophy of science…
Experiencing Geometry in Roman Surveyors’ Texts
The surveyors who mapped and measured the Roman world engaged broadly with the Greek tradition of mathematical literature, transforming it to fit their profession’s practical needs and to enhance the cultural status of their discipline. This paper will explore the transformative strategies used by Hyginus Gromaticus and Balbus, two agrimensorial authors who wrote in the late first or early second century ce . Both authors work to integrate Greek …
Proportion
Proportion ( analogia , symmetria ), the relationship of magnitudes to one another or to a whole, was an important part of both Greek music and mathematics.
Archimedes of Syracuse
Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287–212 BCE ) was one of antiquity's most influential mathematicians and scientists.
Eutocius
Eutocius of Ascalon (ca. 480–530 CE ) wrote commentaries to Archimedes' On the Sphere and Cylinder ( SC ), Planes in Equilibrium , and Measurement of the Circle , and to Appolonius' Conica . He is also said to have written scholia on Ptolemy's Syntaxis Mathematica , which do not survive. His works were edited by Heiberg in the third book of his Archimedis Opera ; an annotated English translation of the commentaries to SC is included in Netz (2004…
Proof
The Greek tradition of proof, in the sense of an explicitly marked method of deriving conclusions using valid arguments, developed gradually, and the techniques and requirements of proof varied between disciplines and philosophical traditions.
Hippasos of Metapontum
Hippasos of Metapontum (ca. 520–480 BCE ) was a Pythagorean mathematician and harmonicist.
Diagrams, mathematical
Diagrams ( diagrammata , katagraphai ) were essential to Greek mathematics, as propositions were typically proved by means of operations carried out on geometrical figures, rather than operations on abstract algebraic symbols, as in modern mathematics.
Experiencing Geometry in Roman Surveyors’ Texts
The surveyors who mapped and measured the Roman world engaged broadly with the Greek tradition of mathematical literature, transforming it to fit their profession’s practical needs and to enhance the cultural status of their discipline. This paper will explore the transformative strategies used by Hyginus Gromaticus and Balbus, two agrimensorial authors who wrote in the late first or early second century ce . Both authors work to integrate Greek …
Proportion
Proportion ( analogia , symmetria ), the relationship of magnitudes to one another or to a whole, was an important part of both Greek music and mathematics.
Archimedes of Syracuse
Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287–212 BCE ) was one of antiquity's most influential mathematicians and scientists.
Eutocius
Eutocius of Ascalon (ca. 480–530 CE ) wrote commentaries to Archimedes' On the Sphere and Cylinder ( SC ), Planes in Equilibrium , and Measurement of the Circle , and to Appolonius' Conica . He is also said to have written scholia on Ptolemy's Syntaxis Mathematica , which do not survive. His works were edited by Heiberg in the third book of his Archimedis Opera ; an annotated English translation of the commentaries to SC is included in Netz (2004…
Proof
The Greek tradition of proof, in the sense of an explicitly marked method of deriving conclusions using valid arguments, developed gradually, and the techniques and requirements of proof varied between disciplines and philosophical traditions.
Hippasos of Metapontum
Hippasos of Metapontum (ca. 520–480 BCE ) was a Pythagorean mathematician and harmonicist.
Diagrams, mathematical
Diagrams ( diagrammata , katagraphai ) were essential to Greek mathematics, as propositions were typically proved by means of operations carried out on geometrical figures, rather than operations on abstract algebraic symbols, as in modern mathematics.
Seneca's Scientific Fictions
Seneca's Naturales Quaestiones explains the causes and functional mechanisms of natural phenomena, from common sights like rainbows to exotically out-of-reach ones like comets. The vividness with which he brings them all within the reader's grasp is certainly a literary feat as much as a scientific one, but the rhetorical power of his explanations does not cost them their epistemological validity. Analyses drawn from current philosophy of science…
Experiencing Geometry in Roman Surveyors’ Texts
The surveyors who mapped and measured the Roman world engaged broadly with the Greek tradition of mathematical literature, transforming it to fit their profession’s practical needs and to enhance the cultural status of their discipline. This paper will explore the transformative strategies used by Hyginus Gromaticus and Balbus, two agrimensorial authors who wrote in the late first or early second century ce . Both authors work to integrate Greek …
Latin Didactic, Scientific, and Technical Literature
Roman authors developed a rich and creative literature in Latin on a wide range of scientific and technical subjects, intended for a variety of readerships and spanning many different genres, including didactic poetry, as well as technical prose. This essay discusses literature in Latin that sought to illuminate the natural world for its readers or instruct them in manipulating it. Particular focus is placed on the problems of identifying and cla…
Framing Technologies in Hero and Ptolemy
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Geometer, in a Landscape
In this paper, I will use recent work on embodied cognition to analyze the techniques Hero uses to embody the imposition of mathematical constructions on the physical world in his Dioptra, a text on surveying. Hero shifts geometrical objects, and techniques for manipulating them, into the real world by invoking material attributes that purely geometrical objects do not possess. This shift, in turn, demands an innovative restructuring of conceptua…
A Portable Cosmos
Reviewed by: A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World by Alexander Jones Courtney Roby Alexander Jones. A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 288. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-19-973934-9. The astronomical computer known as the Antikythera Mechanism is of course no stranger to the attentions of bo…
Gods and Robots
BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 371 For example, attentive and exhaustive reading of the poems reveals that the gods sometimes appear to live on a mountain and sometimes in the sky. Since Homer is assumed to be internally consistent, some explanation is required, and this requirement motivates a striking point in Aristarchus’ view of Homeric cosmology: Homer’s Olympus is a very tall mountain reaching above the clouds into the aether or heaven (324–32…
Cycles de la nature, cycles de l’histoire
This volume of essays represents the fruit of an ambitious project driven by two working groups (Sociétés, milieux, climats and Normes et représentations du pouvoir) of the Centre de Recherche en Archéologie, Archéosciences, Histoire at Le Mans Université. Reviewed by: Courtney Roby, Published Online (2021-08-31)Copyright © 2021 by Courtney RobyThis open access publication is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriva…
Archimedes for the rest of us
For Archimedes’ work to have furnished the ‘key theoretical tools’ for the scientific revolution, the texts must have been comprehensible to early modern readers. Yet as Archimedes’ readers and commentators have observed for centuries, his work can be very difficult going indeed. In this chapter, I explore how commentaries and other explanatory texts, like Guidobaldo dal Monte’s 1588 ‘paraphrase’ commentary to Archimedes’ Planes in Equilibrium, c…
The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria was a figure of great importance not only for ancient technology but also for the medieval and early modern traditions that drew on his work. In this book Courtney Roby presents Hero's key strategies for developing, solving, and contextualizing technical problems, not only in his own lifetime but as an influential tradition of creating accessible technical treatises spanning multiple disciplines. While Hero's historical biograp…
Art (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Historical and Literary Studies (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · History (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Historical Astronomy and Related Studies (5 works) · Mathematics (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (4 works)