Chapter 5:

Mathematics Methods in Hellenistic Times

Gamao, Avessa Mae
Galsim, Klinth
Galinato, Rosejel
Flores, Diether
Astronomy Before Ptolemy
3rd Millennium BCE
• An alignment between stones or between a stone and a
prominent natural landmark on the horizon marks
determines the direction of the solstice sunrise or sunset.
Example of Constructions:
* the great stone temple at Stonehenge in England
* other parts of northern Europe
Different Ways of Using the Phases of the Moon to Establish the
Months of their Years
EGYPTIANS MESOPOTAMIA
They employed a 12-month calendar The Babylonians codified the calendar
of 30 days each with an additional 5 into a system of 7 leap years every 19
days tacked on at the end to give the years, each leap year consisting of 13
365-day year. months (8th century BCE)
 2 Concentric Spheres of Celestial Phenomena
• Sphere of the Earth
• Sphere of the Stars (Celestial sphere)
Evidence that Convinced the Greeks of the Earth’s Sphericity
• The shadow of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse has a
circular edge
• Facts that the hull of a ship sailing away disappears before the top of
the mast
• Sense of aesthetics → a sphere was the most perfect solid shape
→ the shape of the heavens should mirror the shape of the earth was
also only natural.
 Evidence that Convinced the Greeks That the Earth was
Stationary in the Middle of the Celestial Sphere
• Evidence of senses → came from the lack of any sensation
of motion of the earth
• Logical argument → came from the general symmetry of
the major celestial phenomena
• Fixed stars → were firmly attached to the celestial sphere
• Constellations → fixed stars that are grouped into patterns
→ These never change their positions with respect to each other and
form the fixed background for the wandering stars.
• Wandering stars → planets
→ They participated in the daily east-to-west rotation of the
celestial sphere.
7 Wanderers
• Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn
Great circle is a section of a sphere by a plane through its
center
Example of Great Circle
1. Ecliptic → a great circle that passes through the 12
constellations of the zodiac
Celestial equator → the center of the
celestial sphere
Vernal and autumnal equinoxes
→ two diametrically opposite points that
the equator and ecliptic intersects when
the sun is located on those intersections
• Summer solstice
• The northern hemisphere faces the
sun
• Winter solstice
• The southern hemisphere faces the sun
2. Local meridian → the great circle that passes through the
north and south points of the horizon and the point directly
overhead, the local zenith

Horizon and Equator

Eudoxus and Spheres
• Eudoxus → largely responsible for turning astronomy into a
mathematical science
→ famous for his work on ratios and the method of exhaustion
→ probably the inventor of the two-sphere model
→ In his scheme, each of the heavenly bodies was placed on the
inner sphere of a set of two or more interconnected spheres
produced the observed motion.
 Sun
 The sun requires two spheres to account for its
two basic motions.
 The outer sphere (represents the sphere of the
stars) rotates westward about its axis is inclined
to the axis of the outer sphere.
Moon Eudoxus Sphere of the
Sun
• Three spheres are necessary.
• The outer sphere → rotates westward about its axis once a day.
• The innermost sphere → makes a complete eastward revolution in 27 1/3
days
27 1/3 days → the time it takes the moon to make one complete journey
Apollonius: Eccenters and Epicycles
• About 150 years Eudoxus, Apollonius attempted a new
answer to Plato’s challenge.
Ways of Discovering the Velocity of the Sun Around
the Ecliptic that it Was Not Constant

Babylonians connection with their attempts to determine the time

of first visibility of the moon each month.

Greeks determining that the seasons of the year were not

equal in length
 Apollonius or one of his predecessors proposed the
following solution to Satisfy Plato’s rules:
• Place the eccenter (center of the sun’s orbit at a point)
displaced away from the earth.
• Then if the sun moves uniformly around the deferent circle
(the new circle), an observer on earth will see more than a
quarter of the circle against the spring quadrant (the upper
right) than against the summer quadrant (the upper left).
• Eccentricity → not following a
perfectly circular path
• Perigee → the point in outer space
where an object travelling around the
Earth is closest to the Earth
• Apogee → the point in outer space
where an object traveling around the
Earth is farthest away from the Earth
• Explanation on Prograde Motion
• Retrograde motion happens when planet is
brightest & opposite sun
Early Trigonometry
 Early Trigonometry
(Hellenistic Period)
 Aristarchus of Samos
(310–230 BCE)
 To Aristarchus, the Sun was at the center of the solar system,
he devised a method for measuring the distance between
the Earth and the Sun. He couldn’t find an absolute distance
but rather he found the ratio of the distances between the
Earth and the Sun and the Earth and the Moon. Aristarchus
observed that when the Moon is half full, the angle between
the line of sight from Earth to Sun and the line of sight from
Earth to Moon was a small amount less than a right angle.
 Where ∠ SEM is close to a right angle and hence ∠ ESM is a
small angle. Aristarchus estimated ∠ ESM to be one-thirtieth
of a quadrant (in our notation, ). Since trigonometry had not
yet been invented, Aristarchus couldn’t then say that ME/SE =
sin 3° and then use a trig table or a calculator to find the
numerical value of csc 3° as his ratio. What he did do was to
derive inequalities which he used to bound the ratio between
two quantities.
 Aristarchus then showed that 1/20 < sin 3° < 1/18; so the
Sun is between 18 and 20 times as far from the Earth as the
Moon is. Today it is known that the Sun is in fact much
farther from the Earth than that amount. The reason for
the discrepancy is not in the mathematics, it’s because ∠
ESM is smaller than the ancient estimate, close to 1/6th of
a degree. If one uses this value and Aristarchus’
calculations, one gets a very good idea of the true value of
the relation of the distances.
 Hipparchus of Nicaea
(ca. 180 - ca. 125
B.C.E.)
 He did not use the sine or cosine functions, however. For
Hipparchus and the later Greek writers, the fundamental
trigonometric object was the chord of a circle as a function of
the corresponding arc. Measuring the chord in units
expressed in terms of the radius of the circle, Hipparchus
made tables of the chord of an arc.
 In a twelve-volume book, he explained his methods of
calculation, wrote out his table, and applied it to derive
many facts about specific stars - including the locations of
850 ‘fixed stars’, the length of the lunar month and the year,
the size of the Moon, and other facts in astronomy.
Unfortunately, nearly all of Hipparchus’ writings are no
longer in existence; what we know of them comes from
much later commentaries about the work of Claudius
Ptolemy, the later mathematical astronomer.
  Menelaus of Alexandria
(circa 100 CE)

 Menelaus studied geometry in a plane and on a sphere. (A

theorem of advanced Euclidean geometry is named after
him.) Along the way, he needed to deal with the relation
of chord to arc.
 When the radius OB is extended to a
diameter BB′ , the Pythagorean theorem can
be applied to the triangle BAB′, since an
angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle:
(AB)₂ + (AB′)₂ = (diameter)2. Here AB is the
chord of (arc AB) and AB′ is the chord of
(semicircle – arc AB). This is essentially the
fundamental identity of modern
trigonometry, sin₂𝜃+cos₂𝜃=1 , since the
cosine is the “complement’s sine”: sin(𝜋/2-𝜃)
=cos𝜃. Both Menelaus and C. Ptolemy used
this identity to derive many theorems.
 Claudius Ptolemy
(85–165 CE)
 Claudius Ptolemy wrote major books about geography
and astronomy. In his cosmology, the Earth is at the
center of the universe, and planetary orbits are slightly
perturbed circular paths. Ptolemy continued the work
of Hipparchus and used new trigonometric identities
to make very detailed tables of values of the chord
function. The half-arc formula contains a square root,
so Ptolemy had to calculate numerous square roots,
inevitably resulting in truncation or round-off errors of
approximation These trigonometric tables were used
in elaborate, often elegant, astronomical calculations.
 Following Hipparchus he divided a circle into 360 equal
parts. He used sexagesimal subdivisions of a part, to
avoid, as he said, “the embarrassment of fractions.” For
instance, he approximated crd 36° as 37p 4′ 55″, with
one chordal part being one sixtieth of a radius; since he
usually referred to a radius of 60 units, this is 37;4,55
units - in Neugebauer’s notation; otherwise, it is
0;37,4,55 of a radius. He approximated the ratio later
called pi by 3;8,30 – which is 377/120, or 3.141666…