帕普斯290—350

出生于今埃及亚历山大港，主要活跃于公元4世纪早期，其生平不详。根据其著作推断，帕普斯主要当数学老师。著书甚多，主要作品《数学汇编》成书约340年，全书共有8卷，现今仅存的希腊文版本首尾部分有缺失，仅有第3卷至第7卷及第2卷和第8卷的部分存世。该书经费代里科·科曼迪诺翻译成拉丁文后开始在欧洲广为流传，书中的几何原理和方法影响了包括勒内·笛卡儿，皮埃尔·德·费马和艾萨克·牛顿在内的诸多数学家。

Pappus of Alexandria (; Ancient Greek: Πάππος ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς; c. 290 – c. 350 AD) was a Greek mathematician of late antiquity known for his Synagoge (Ancient Greek: Συναγωγή) or Collection (c. 340), and for Pappus's hexagon theorem in projective geometry. Almost nothing is known about his life except for what can be found in his own writings, many of which are lost. Pappus apparently lived in Alexandria, where he worked as a mathematics teacher to higher level students, one of whom was named Hermodorus.

The Collection, his best-known work, is a compendium of mathematics in eight volumes, the bulk of which survives. It covers a wide range of topics that were part of the ancient mathematics curriculum, including geometry, astronomy, and mechanics.

Pappus was active in a period generally considered one of stagnation in mathematical studies, where, to some, he stands out as a remarkable exception and, to others, as an exemplar of ills that halted the progress of Greek science. In many respects, his fate strikingly resembles that of Diophantus', originally of limited importance but becoming very influential in the late Renaissance and Early Modern periods.

Dating

In his surviving writings, Pappus gives no indication of the date of the authors whose works he makes use of, or of the time (but see below) when he himself wrote. If no other date information were available, all that could be known would be that he was later than Ptolemy (died c. 168), whom he quotes, and earlier than Proclus (born c. 411), who quotes him.

The 10th century Suda states that Pappus was of the same age as Theon of Alexandria, who was active in the reign of Emperor Theodosius I (372–395). A different date is given by a marginal note to a late 10th-century manuscript (a copy of a chronological table by the same Theon), which states, next to an entry on Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305), that "at that time wrote Pappus".

However, a verifiable date comes from the dating of a solar eclipse mentioned by Pappus himself. In his commentary on the Almagest he calculates "the place and time of conjunction which gave rise to the eclipse in Tybi in 1068 after Nabonassar". This works out as 18 October 320, and so Pappus must have been active around 320.

Collection

Pappus's Collection contains an account, systematically arranged, of the most important results obtained by his predecessors and notes explanatory of, or extending, previous discoveries. These discoveries form, in fact, a text upon which Pappus enlarges discursively. Heath considered the systematic introductions to the various books valuable, for they set forth clearly an outline of the contents and the general scope of the subjects to be treated. In these introductions, the style of Pappus's writing is excellent and even elegant the moment he is free from the shackles of mathematical formulae and expressions. Heath also found his characteristic exactness made his Collection "a most admirable substitute for the texts of the many valuable treatises of earlier mathematicians of which time has deprived us".

The surviving portions of Collection can be summarized as follows.

Book I

Book I has been lost. Book I, like Book II, may have been concerned with arithmetic, as Book III is clearly introduced as beginning a new subject.

Legacy

Pappus's Collection was relatively unknown in medieval Europe, but exerted great influence on 17th-century mathematics after being translated to Latin by Federico Commandino. Diophantus's Arithmetica and Pappus's Collection were the two major sources of Viète's In artem analyticam isagoge (1591). The Pappus's problem and its generalization led Descartes to the development of analytic geometry. Fermat also developed his version of analytic geometry and his method of Maxima and Minima from Pappus's summaries of Apollonius's lost works Plane Loci and On Determinate Section. Other mathematicians influenced by Pappus were Pacioli, da Vinci, Kepler, van Roomen, Pascal, Newton, Bernoulli, Euler, Gauss, Gergonne, Steiner and Poncelet.

In How to Solve It, a 1945 book on problem solving, mathematician George Pólya credited Book VII's discussion of geometrical analysis and synthesis as a first attempt to define the field that would later be known as heuristics:In the seventh book of his Collectiones, Pappus reports about a branch of study which he calls analyomenos.