>At 11:17 AM 26/02/1999 -0700, David Fowler wrote:
>
>> I cannot resist joining in with a few quotations from the highly scholarly
>> book:
>>
>> W Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, Harvard University
>> Press, 1972.
>>
>> It is perhaps not the sort of tome that one would normally recommend to
>> hard-pressed and overworked teachers, but its existence should be at least
>> known to any historians of mathematics who set out to advise them on this
>> particular topic. It is a very thorough study of the evidence concerning
>> Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, and it differs from many other such by
>> taking the role of mathematics very seriously. (Van der Waerden was a
>> friend and they apparently corresponded extensively. It seems to me that
>> they must have disagreed over many issues, but in a thoroughly correct
>> manner; I would love to see their letters.) Anyway here are just a few
>> short quotations.
...
>> Reviel Netz, author of an upcoming book _The Shaping of Deduction in Greek
>> Mathematics_, CUP, sums it all up pithily:
>>
>> "Pythagoras the mathematician finally died in 1972!"
>>
>Dear David,
>
>Why not, instead,
>
> "Pythagoras, the mathematician, finally died in 1962" ?
>
>Am I being too subtle?
>
>With best regards,
>Julio
Dear Julio,
We did talk about that; your point is that the German edition of the book
was published in 1962. But the English translation is an expanded version,
and neither of us has ever seen this German original, so didn't know what
material had been added. Mathematics? What is unusual about Burkert's
book is the amount of consideration he gives to this topic, which is very
unusual for works by classical scholars. (I can cite book on
Pythagoreanism that do not even use the word. Does this tell us something
about the classical scholarly tradition or about Pythagoreanism?)
Of course, Reviel was in a quandry. If he put 1962, 99% would ask why;
wasn't the book published in 1972, while, if he put 1972, the 1% like Julio
would ask why; wasn't the book published in 1962. But things like that
should not affect the true scholar!
Behind all this is a serious question: has anyone looked a both the German
and English edition suficiently closely to give some idea of what was added?
Very best wishes,
David