Introduction to Book 7

§ 18. The Domain of Analysis. Book 7 of the Collection is a

companion to several geometrical treatises, which by Pappus's time were
alotted to a special branch of mathematics, the a.vaAv Oil e v 0 ú = T 071' 0 ú = ,
or 'Domain of Analysis'.1 62 These books were supposed to equip the
geometer with a "special resource" enabling him to solve geometrical
problems. More precisely, they were to help him in a particular kind of
mathematical argument called 'analysis'. The nature of Greek geometrical
analysis has been the subject of an enormous philosophical and
metamathematical literature, to which I am reluctant to add. 1 6 3 The
following remarks are meant only as a description of analysis as it actually
occurs in Pappus and other ancient texts, and to show the application of the
"Domain of Analysis" to it.
In ancient geometry 'analysis' had none of its modern connotations,
but referred to a kind of reversal of the normal 'synthetic' method of proof
or construction. Synthesis began with assumed abstract objects and
statements about them, and, by a series of steps conventionally admitted to
be valid, eventually arrived at a desired conclusion: the validity of an
assertion in a 'theorem', the construction of a specified object in a 'problem'.
A synthetic proof of any but the simplest propositions might be difficult to
discover directly, so that as a preliminary approach it would be
advantageous to work backwards from the goal, on the supposition that the
order of the steps could be reversed to produce a valid synthesis of the
proposition.

162 See the notes to 7.1.

163 One recent paper, Mahoney [1968], is notable, in spite of several

misconceptions, for its refreshing emphasis on analysis as a
mathematicians' tool rather than philosophical method, and for its
bibliographical references. A more promising line of investigation
than the meticulous hermeneusis of the same few passages in Greek
authors (Pappus, Marinus, the scholiast to Elements XIII) might be
the reception and development of Greek analysis by Arabic
mathematicians, of which there survive copious theoretical
discussions and examples in practice that have yet to be studied.
 § 18 The Domain of Analysis 67

Pappus draws (in 7.2) an important distinction between the analysis

of theorems (propositions in which the validity of an assertion is to be
determined) and the analysis of problems (propositions requiring the
construction of a described object from various data). Actual examples of
'theorematical' analysis in ancient texts are not numerous: they include a
well known series of analyses of the first five propositions in Book 13 of the
Elements inserted into the transmitted text at some time after Euclid,l 6 4
and some instances in Pappus, for example 7.225, .226, .231, and .321 in
Book 7. As these show, analysis as applied to theorems was a
comparatively naive technique using the same kinds of logical steps as
synthetic proof, but beginning with the assumption of that which is to be
proved, and advancing until a conclusion is reached thatis known to be true
(or false) independently of the assumption. Consequently the technique
guarantees neither the correctness of the proposition nor the possibility of
obtaining a valid proof by inverting the steps of the argument. For
example, in 7.321 the proposition is indeed correct, but the analysis that
apparently verifies it is not reversible, a circumstance that explains
Pappus's difficulties in attempting a synthesis of the proposition in 7.319.
However, if the analysis arrives at a conclusion independently known to be
false, or inconsistent with the assumption, then it is a valid disproof by
reductio ad absurdum, and requires no inversion; such proofs are, of course,
well attested.
In contrast to their counterpart for theorems, analyses of problems
are very common in Greek treatises. There seem to have been two reasons
for this fact: first, there existed an expandable repertory of operations that
were reversible as steps in geometrical construction (so that the analysis of
a problem had a degree of cogency lacking in theorematic analysis); and
secondly, an analysis could yield information about the conditions of
possibility and number of solutions of a problem, the determination of
which, or 'diorism', was an essential part of a complete solution of a
problem. Essential to the analysis of problems was the concept of being
'given', which was applied both to those objects that are assumed at the
beginning of a problem, and to any other objects that are determined by the
assumptions. The word 'given' had a wide range of mathematical
connotations in antiquity, 1 65 but the most common meanings were
'assumed', 'determined', and 'determined and constructible'. The distinction
between the second and third arises only in problems, such as the trisection

1 64 Euclid, Opera vol. 4 pp. 364-76.

1 6 5 They are discussed, rather confusingly, by Marinus (fifth century

A.D.) in his introduction to Euclid's Data (Euclid, Opera vol. 6 pp.
234-57).