David Pingree is Brown's rare sleuth, exploring the history of mathematics
It is not surprising David Pingree likes his new office, where, from one end of the Sayles Gym basketball court to the other, some 20,000 books and manuscripts involving the mathematics of Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, the Near East and India are at his fingertips rather than scattered throughout Wilbour Hall.
Last December, renovations to Wilbour Hall required Pingree to move his office and library collection to Sayles. It took him two months to pack 400 boxes and a bevy of laborers to move them. After such an extensive undertaking, "I am going to stay as long as they let me," Pingree said.
Scholars from around the world travel to Brown to use Pingree's library. His collection of Sanskrit, the classical language of India, is considered by many to be one of the best of its kind. In recent years, it has attracted a number of researchers from Japan.
Pingree is as much an anomaly in academia as his department: the history of mathematics. Not only is it Brown's smallest department, it is also the only formal history of mathematics department in the world. Its scholarship has been prolific; its ranks of scholars, distinguished. But it may be safe to say that without Pingree the department might not exist. He is its only full professor. There are only three graduate students, all of whom are at Brown to study with Pingree, and the department does not offer an undergraduate concentration.
Pingree's sole departmental colleague is Kim Plofker, a visiting lecturer who received her Ph.D. from Brown under Pingree's tutelage. "Mathematicians don't do history, historians don't do math, and linguists don't do mathematics," she said. "The history of mathematics is a woefully understudied field. There is so much to be done."
The department was founded at Brown in 1947, and was first headed by Otto Neugebauer, recognized as the world's leading historian of Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greek mathematics. During the 1950s and 1960s, the members of the department devoted themselves to fundamental research of tablets, papyri and manuscripts that detailed the ancient mathematical sciences. The research produced several landmark texts. The 1970s were the department's most prosperous times, with four professors busily unwrapping the mysteries of ancient mathematics. Pingree was recruited to Brown by Neugebauer. He arrived on College Hill in 1971, and became chairman of the department in 1986.
"People like Pingree and Neugebauer were pioneers. I am part of the second or third generation of scholars manning the outposts of territory that the pioneers have touched, but remains remarkably unexplored," said Plofker, who researches the history of approximation in Indian mathematics and is planning a course on the history of calculus.
Pingree has devoted his life's work to understanding the transmission of mathematics, astronomy and astrology from the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia through Renaissance Europe, and the ways the recipient culture would alter the ideas to render them accessible to their people. "Each time there is a transmission there is a transformation," he said. "It is only in modern times that Western science is transmitted without being changed."
To achieve his research ends, Pingree employs a number of skills. He is linguist, historian, mathematician, anthropologist and sleuth. "Professor Pingree is a world-renowned classicist, Sanskritist, Assyriologist and Arabist all rolled into one," said Plofker.
Pingree has used records of a later period and culture to reconstruct the sciences of an earlier one. For example, he used Greek astrology to clarify earlier Babylonian omen texts, 8th- and 9th-century Arabic texts to reconstruct 5th-century Sassanian (Persian) astronomy and astrology, and Byzantine Greek astronomical tables to reconstruct their Arabic and Persian sources.
To do this, Pingree has traveled the world in search of primary sources. He estimates that in India alone there are 30 million Sanskrit manuscripts. "There is an enormous mass of unpublished materials out there," he said. The difficulty is that many institutions don't know what they possess. Few people at libraries can read and understand the mathematical texts, Pingree said, causing many texts to remain out of circulation for many years.
For example, the Budleian Library in England once received a collection of Sanskrit astrological texts from a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi Germany during World War II. Because the Budleian's Orientalists were all working to crack Adolph Hitler's codes, the collection was put in the stacks. It wasn't until 1986 that the collection was discovered among the library's possessions. "They decided to sweep the floor, something they apparently hadn't done in a long time, and they found the collection," Pingree said, chuckling in dismay. Pingree was soon off to England to catalog the collection. "We sat on the floor piecing it all together. It was absolutely astonishing."
To help ensure that North America's collections of South Asian manuscripts are properly protected, Pingree is leading two dozen scholars in cataloging, digitizing and putting the 35,000 or so texts onto microfilm. He estimates the project will take 15 to 20 years. "I've wanted to do something to save the manuscripts for decades," he said. "Now we are doing it."