Conference Announcement

Dear All, I am pleased to announce that an international conference on Ancient Greek Mathematics will be hosted by Birkbeck College, University of London, and I would be grateful if you could circulate this email to colleagues and students who might be interested. International Conference, London: 10-11 May 2014
Birkbeck, Malet str. building, Council room

Revolutions and Continuity in Greek Mathematics

In 1962, T. Kuhns influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions challenged the dominant view of the time that scientific progress is continuous and introduced the (rather revolutionary) term revolution in the vocabulary of the historians of science. Considering that the scholars of ancient Greek mathematics do not (usually) work in literary isolation, it was only a matter of time before this terminology was introduced into the field; thus, when S. Ungurus 1975 paper On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics caused heated debates on the nature of Greek mathematics, some scholars rushed to support the idea that a revolution took place. An agreement, however, could not be reached, not only in regard to the current state of affairs in the discipline, but, perhaps more importantly, in regard to the usefulness of employing terms like revolutions and continuity in order to describe the progress of the field. While these debates were taking place in the field of the historiography of Greek mathematics, time did not stand still in the field of its history either; in fact, the impressive number of recent publications reveals growing interest for the subject. Historians of Greek

mathematics today apply methodologies, which appear as diverse as the authors themselves; i.e., in terms of language, culture, educational background and selection of topics. The aim of this two-day international conference is to bring together a number of leading scholars of Ancient Greek mathematics in order to explore the ideas of revolutions and continuity as they appear in/disappear from the Greek mathematics. Within this framework, we shall endeavour, through examining various case-studies, to identify and evaluate some general characteristics of the methodologies and approaches of the discipline as practiced today and, additionally, to suggest directions for future research. Speakers: Sabetai Unguru, University of Tel-Aviv Claas Lattmann, University of Kiel Michael Weinman, Bard College Berlin A E L Davis, Imperial College (TBC) Henry Mendel, California State University Ellen Harlizius-Klck, University of Copenhagen Courtney Roby, Cornell University Andrew Gregory, University College London Serafina Cuomo, Birkbeck College Vassilis Karasmanis, National Technical University of Athens Naoya Iwata, University of Cambridge Gabriele Galluzzo, University of Exeter Elizabeth Kosmetatou, University of Illinois Springfield Jean Christianidis, University of Athens --------------------

In the following webpage you can find the provisional programme, the abstracts, and registration information:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/about-us/events/revolutions-and-continuity-in-greek-mathematics

Please notice that due to limited space, unfortunately, we will only be able to accept a very small number of participants.

Dr Michalis Sialaros British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of History, Classics and Archaeology Birkbeck College, University of London m.sialaros@bbk.ac.uk